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.

‘Here’s a young gentleman asks a bit o’ dinner, and a young I-d’n-know-what ‘s after the same; I leaves it to you, missus.’

His wife took it off his shoulders in good humour, saying it was lucky she made the pie big enough for her family and strays.  They would not accept more than a shilling for our joint repast.  The man said that was the account to a farthing, if I was too proud to be a poor man’s guest, and insisted on treating him like a public.  Perhaps I would shake hands at parting?  I did cordially, and remembered him when people were not so civil.