to go to school; if not there, then
to go home. My idea, which I had only partly conceived, was to have a
look at Riversley over a hedge, kiss my aunt Dorothy unaware, and
fly subsequently in search of my father. Breakfast, however, was my
immediate thought. He and the girl sat down to breakfast at the inn
as my guests. We ate muttonchops and eggs, and drank coffee. After it,
though I had no suspicions, I noticed that the man grew thoughtful. He
proposed to me, supposing I had no objection against slow travelling,
to join company for a couple of days, if I was for Hampshire, which I
stated was the county I meant to visit.

'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