They ported the canoe and luggage down a steep and slippery overfall, launched her again, and shot down past Harvington Weir, where a crowd of small sandpipers kept them company for a mile, flitting ahead and alighting but to take wing again.  Tilda had fallen silent.  By and by, as they passed the Fish and Anchor Inn, she looked up at Mr. Jessup and asked—­

“But if you want to paint fast, why not travel by train?”

“I thought of it,” Mr. Jessup answered gravely.  “But the railroad hereabouts wasn’t engineered to catch the sentiment, and it’s the sentiment I’m after—­the old-world charm of field and high-road and leafy hedgerow, if you understand me.”  Here he paused of a sudden, and laid his sketch-block slowly down on his knee.  “Je-hosaphat!” he exclaimed, his eyes brightening.  “Why ever didn’t I think of it?”

“Think of wot?”

He nodded his head.

“You’ll see, missie, when we get to Evesham!  You’ve put a notion into me—­and we’re going to rattle up Turner and make him hum.  The guide-books say he spent considerable of his time at Tewkesbury.  I disremember if he’s buried there; but we’ll wake his ghost, anyway.”

So by Offenham and Dead Man Eyot they came to the high embankment of a railway, and thence to a bridge, and a beautiful bell-tower leapt into view, soaring above the mills and roofs of Evesham.

At Evesham, a little above the Workman Gardens, they left the canoe in charge of a waterman, and fared up to the town, where Mr. Jessup led them into a palatial hotel—­or so it seemed to the children—­and ordered a regal luncheon.  It was served by a waiter in a dress suit; an ancient and benign-looking person, whose appearance and demeanour so weighed upon Tilda that, true to her protective instinct, she called up all her courage to nod across the table at Arthur Miles and reassure him.  To her stark astonishment, the boy was eating without embarrassment, as though to be waited on with this pomp had been a mere matter of course.

When the cheese was brought, Mr. Jessup left them on a trivial pretext, and absented himself so long that at length she began to wonder what would happen if he had “done a bilk,” and left them to discharge the score.  The waiter hovered around, nicking at the side-tables with his napkin and brushing them clean of imaginary crumbs.

Tilda, eking out her last morsel of biscuit, opined that their friend would surely be back presently.  She addressed the remark to Arthur Miles; but the waiter at once stepped forward.

“It is to be ’oped!” said he, absent-mindedly dusting the back of a chair.

Just at this moment a strange throbbing noise drew him to the window, to gaze out into the street.  It alarmed the children too, and they were about to follow and seek the cause of it, when Mr. Jessup appeared in the doorway.

“I’ve managed it!” he announced, and calling to the waiter, demanded the bill.