’Well then, here now, come along, d ‘ye see, look,’ said he, ’I mustn’t be pounced on, and no missing young gentleman in my society, and me took half-a-crown for his absence; that won’t do.  You get on pretty well with the gal, and that ’s a screaming farce:  none of us do.  Lord! she looks down on such scum as us.  She’s gipsy blood, true sort; everything’s sausages that gets into their pockets, no matter what it was when it was out.  Well then, now, here, you and the gal go t’ other side o’ Bed’lming, and you wait for us on the heath, and we ’ll be there to comfort ye ‘fore dark.  Is it a fister?’

He held out his hand; I agreed; and he remarked that he now counted a breakfast in the list of his gains from never asking questions.

I was glad enough to quit the village in a hurry, for the driver of the geese, or a man dreadfully resembling him, passed me near the public-house, and attacked my conscience on the cowardly side, which is, I fear, the first to awaken, and always the liveliest half while we are undisciplined.  I would have paid him money, but the idea of a conversation with him indicated the road back to school.  My companion related her history.  She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on the road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps:  she called them mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them.  Gipsies, she said, were a different sort:  gipsies camped in gentlemen’s parks; gipsies, horses, fiddles, and the wide world—­that was what she liked.  The wide world she described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end of it I let her talk on.  For me to talk of my affairs to a girl without bonnet and boots would have been absurd.  Otherwise, her society pleased me:  she was so like a boy, and unlike any boy I knew.

My mental occupation on the road was to calculate how many hill-tops I should climb before I beheld Riversley.  The Sunday bells sounded homely from village to village as soon as I was convinced that I heard no bells summoning boarders to Rippenger’s school.  The shops in the villages continued shut; however, I told the girl they should pay me for it next day, and we had an interesting topic in discussing as to the various things we would buy.  She was for bright ribands and draper’s stuff, I for pastry and letter-paper.  The smell of people’s dinners united our appetites.  Going through a village I saw a man carrying a great baked pie, smelling overpoweringly, so that to ask him his price for it was a natural impulse with me.  ‘What! sell my Sunday dinner?’ he said, and appeared ready to drop the dish.  Nothing stopped his staring until we had finished a plateful a-piece and some beer in his cottage among his family.  He wanted to take me in alone.  ‘She’s a common tramp,’ he said of the girl.

‘That’s a lie,’ she answered.

Of course I would not leave her hungry outside, so in the end he reluctantly invited us both, and introduced us to his wife.