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“Why, each time you go to bed you’re a day nearer.” He pulled out his watch. “Talking of bed—do you know it’s half-past five? What’s your bed-time?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned against him with the prompt abandonment of a child discovering its own fatigue.

“Not far off, anyway! I’ve got to get you home, young woman.”

“Aunt Adela will be angry.” But her tone was merely speculative. Laura was stone to Aunt Adela’s worst punishments now.

Justin considered. The steadiness of the rain, long overdue, was prophetic. No chance of its lifting this week-end. No escape, for all his wasted hour, for Justin’s bicycle. Justin’s bicycle must submit to a soaking, with Justin and Laura on its back. It had, going by the road that avoided Laura’s hill-tops, a seven-mile run before it, to reach even Justin’s end of Brackenhurst. Justin, as he slipped off the damp haystack and resumed his sopping coat, thought that he and his bicycle would have done their duty and something over if they escorted Laura thus far. She could be sent on to Green Gates in the pony-trap, if his mother did not insist, as he shrewdly suspected she would when she heard the whole story, on keeping the child over-night, to be coddled against colds and heartache.