Their steady pace took them along.  They were getting away from the hills, and the Weald was opening before them.  The sun shone on them, and the willows on either side the road declared that April was at hand.  They eased down to a walk.

Silver opened his chest.

“I feel like singing!” he cried.

“Sing then,” said Boy.

In his quiet booming voice he sang a verse from Two on the Downs, which in their long hacks home of evening she had taught him—­

Sing ho! 
So we go,
Over Downs that are surging green
Under the sky and the seas that lie
Silvery-strewn between.

He finished and turned to her with a laugh and shining eyes.

She glanced away, and on her face was that delicious wary look he loved so well, baffling and baffled, disturbing because disturbed, as when a little wind ruffles at evening a willow, exposing to the sky in spite of protest the silvery undersides of naked, shining leaves.

Jim Silver edged across to her.

“Miss Woodburn!” he said quietly.  He held out a great gloved hand.

Boy looked resolutely between her horse’s ears.

“Trot,” she said.

A few straggling foot-passengers, an occasional trap, a man on a bicycle, and some children pushing a perambulator, showed them they were drawing near their goal.

About half a mile in front the road opened on to a green.  There among trees they could see a gathering of men and horses.

“Good!” cried the young man.  “They haven’t moved off yet.  Shall we slow down?”

“Best get on, I think,” replied the girl.

A man in a slouch hat, carrying a gamp as untidy as himself, was walking before them down the middle of the road.

“Ass!” muttered the young man.  “Why can’t he keep to one side?”

Boy shot ahead, Silver took a pull.  Banjo made a fuss, took offence, then went striding hugely by, and shied off, splashing through a puddle.

The brown waters rose and drenched the pedestrian.

“Thank you!” he called furiously after the horseman.

Banjo, as though frightened at his deed, tried a bolt.  A horseman of unusual power, Silver steadied the great horse and swung him across the road.  There Banjo sidled, yawed, and passaged, fretting to be after the brown.

The young man, swinging to the motions of the tossing gray, raised his hand in that large and gracious way of his.

“So sorry,” he shouted back.

The man with the gamp shuffled toward him.

“Of course it wasn’t deliberate!” he cried.

It was Silver’s turn to be angry.

He gripped the gray, lifted him round like a polo pony, and drove him back to the angry man.

“You don’t think I’d do a thing like that on purpose!” he said, and saw for the first time that the man with the gamp was Joses.

“You didn’t know it was me, of course,” sneered the other, shaking with anger.