Then Kay chanted “Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,” and it was just like that.  One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge, waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short, all the symptoms common to his kind.

So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry bull.

“You look out you don’t fall, Gerda,” Kay flung back at her over his shoulder.  “It will be to a dreadful death, as you see.  Nobody’ll save you; nobody’ll dare.”

“Feeling unsteady?” Barry’s gentler voice asked her from behind.  “Get off and walk it.  I will too.”

But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan’s swift, sure progress ahead.  Barry should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and would despise cowards.

They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field.  And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for them to descend.

“I don’t like that creature,” Kay said.  “I’m afraid of him.  Aren’t you, Barry?”

“Desperately,” Barry admitted.  “Anyone would be, except Nan, of course.”

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to charge.  But he did not charge Nan.  Bulls and other ferocious beasts think it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an unfrightened victim.  He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would do.

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm.  Gerda followed Kay.  As she dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met Barry’s eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking “I can bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen.  I couldn’t bear it if I were the last and no one saw.”  To be gored all alone, none to care ... who could bear that?

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side, bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull.  Did he know she was frightened?  She hadn’t shown it, surely.

“The wind,” said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, “has gone round more to the south.  Don’t you think so?” And reminded Barry of a French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to the scaffold.

“I believe it has,” he said, and smiled.

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles, didn’t charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises until they left him behind at the next gate.

“Did you,” enquired Gerda, casually, “notice that bull?  He was an awfully fine one, wasn’t he?”

“A remarkably noble face, I thought,” Kay returned.

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.

5