Rodney said again, “You absolute rotter.  Why didn’t you tell me?  What in the name of anything induced you to walk at all?  You needn’t have.”

Peter looked down the long road that wound and wound into the morning land.  “I wanted to,” he said.  “I wanted to most awfully....  I wanted to try it....  I thought perhaps it was the one thing....  Football’s off for me, you know—­and most other things....  Only diabolo left ... and ping-pong ... and jig-saw.  I’m quite good at those ... but oh, I did want to be able to walk.  Horribly I wanted it.”

“Well,” said Rodney practically, “it’s extremely obvious that you aren’t.  You ought to have got into that thing, of course.  Only then, as you remarked, you would have felt sick.  Really, Margery....”

“Oh, I know,” Peter stopped him hastily. “Don’t say the usual things; I really feel too unwell to bear them.  I know I’m made in Germany and all that—­I’ve been hearing so all my life.  And now I should like you to go on to Florence, and I’ll follow, very slow.  It’s all very well, Rodney, but you were going at about seven miles an hour.  Talk of motors—­I couldn’t see the scenery as we rushed by.  That’s such a Vandal-like way of crossing Tuscany.”

“Well, you can cross the rest of Tuscany by train.  There’s a station at Montelupo; we shall be there directly.”

Peter, abruptly renouncing his intention of getting up, lay back giddily.  The marvellous morning was splendid on the mountains.

“How extremely lucky,” remarked Peter weakly, “that I wasn’t in this position when Denis came by.  Denis usually does come by at these crucial moments you know—­always has.  He probably thinks by now that I am an escaped inhabitant of the Permanent Casualty Ward.  Bother.  I wish he didn’t.”

“Since it’s obvious,” said Rodney, “that you can’t stand, let alone walk, I had better go on to Montelupo and fetch a carriage of sorts.  I wonder if you can lie there quietly till I come back, or if you’ll be having seizures and things?  Well, I can’t help it.  I must go, anyhow.  There’s the whisky on your left.”

Peter watched him go; he went at seven miles an hour; the dust ruffled and leapt at his heels.

Peter sat very still leaning back against the rough white wall, and thought what a pity it all was.  What a pity, and what a bore, that one could not do things like other people.  Short of being an Urquhart, who could do everything and had everything, whose passing car flamed triumphant and lit the world into a splendid joy, and was approved under investigation with “quite all right”—­short of that glorious competence and pride of life, one might surely be an average man, who could walk from San Pietro to Florence without tumbling on the road at dawn.  Peter sighed over it, rather crossly.  The marvellous morning was insulted by his collapse; it became a remote thing, in which he might have no share.  As always, the inexorable “Not for you” rose like a barred gate between him and the lucid country the white road threaded.