The carriage was put up, the tea ordered, and in a little they, too, were sitting at one of the square tables.  Each lady was provided with a high wooden chair, and a little wooden box footstool.  A kettle on a hot potful of smouldering wood ashes was set on the table; cups and saucers and goats’ milk were also supplied to them, and opaque beet-root sugar.  The food they had brought in their baskets, big new broodje split in half, buttered and put together again with a slither of Dutch cheese between.  These and, to wind up with, some thin sweet biscuits carried in a papier-mache box, and handed out singly by Vrouw Van Heigen, who had brought them as a surprise and a treat.

“Do they have such picnics as this in England?” Anna asked, as she gathered up the crumbs of her biscuit.

“I have never been to one,” Julia answered, and inwardly she thought of her mother and Violet driving in a wheeled ark to the wood, there to sit at little wooden tables and stretch their mouths in the public eye.

“Ah!” said Vrouw Snieder; “then it is all the more of a pleasure and a novelty to you.”

Julia said it was, and soon afterwards they rose from the table to walk in the wood.  The two elder ladies did not get far, and before long came back to sit on their wooden chairs again.  The girls went some little distance, all keeping together, and being careful not to wander out of sight and sound of the other picnic parties.  Once when they came to the extreme limit of their walk, Julia half-hesitated.  She looked into the quiet green distance.  It would be easy to leave them, to give them the slip; she could walk at double their pace with half their exertion, she could lose herself among the trees while they were wondering why she had gone, and making up their minds to follow her; and, most important of all, when she came back she could explain everything quite easily, so that they would not think it in the least strange—­an accident, a missing of the way, anything.  Should she do it—­should she?  The wild creature that had lived half-smothered within her for all the twenty years of her life fluttered and stirred.  It had stirred before, rebelling against the shams of the Marbridge life, as it rebelled against the restrictions of the present; it had never had scope or found vent; still, for all that it was not dead; possibly, even, it was growing stronger; it called her now to run away.  But she did not do it; advisability, the Polkingtons’ patron saint, suggested to her that one does not learn to shine in the caged life by allowing oneself the luxury of occasional escape.

She turned her back on the green distance.  “Shall we not go back to where the music is playing?” she said.

They went, walking with their arms entwined as other girls were doing, Julia between the broad, white-skinned sisters, like a rapier between cushions.  The two younger girls ran on in front.  “There is Mevrouw,” they cried.  “She is calling us.  The carriage is ready, too; oh, do you think it is already time to go?”