"Fan's Court," she repeated vaguely. "I don't think I've heard of it."
"Oh, it's a long way from you—beyond Blindly Heath—and only a little place. I'm not very well off, you know."
She glanced at his shabby clothes, and felt embarrassed, for she saw that he had noticed the glance.
He picked up the litter from the roadside, and began to wheel her bicycle down the hill.
"I say," she breathed softly, "this is an adventure."
So it was—for both, in very different ways. For her it was an incursion into lawlessness. Her father was tremendously particular, even her girl friends had to pass the censor before intimacy was allowed, and as for men—why, she had never really known a man in her life, and here she was, picnicing with one her parents had never seen! Nigel was in exactly the opposite position—he was adventuring into law and respectability. He was with a girl, a school-girl, of the upper middle classes, to whom he was simply a rather poverty-stricken country gentleman—to whom his disgrace was unknown, who admitted him to her society on equal terms, ignorant of the barriers that divided them. He looked down at her as she walked by his side, her soft hair freckled with light, her eyes bright with her thrills—and a faint glow came into his cheeks, a faint flutter to his pulses, nothing fierce or mighty, but a great quiet surge that seemed to pass over him like the sea, and leave him stranded in simplicity.
They walked down the steep lane which led from the road, and wound for some yards at the back of Brasses Wood. Here in a hollow stood the shell of a ruined manor, flanked by a moat. Two ivy-smothered towers rose side by side, crowned by strange, pointed caps of stone; the walls were lumped with ivy, grown to an enormous density and stoutness. The place looked deserted. There was a small water-mill behind it, and a farm, but no one was about.
Nigel wheeled Tony's bicycle in at the dismantled door. The roof was gone, and all the upper floors—the sky looked down freely at the grass hillocks which filled the inside of the ruins. There were one or two small rooms still partly ceiled, and these were full of farm implements and mangolds.