"

He shut the door upon them, and mounted to a seat in front. The car was
already humming and throbbing, and the hired chauffeur, climbing to a
seat beside him, started her at once. They were off.

They took the road that leads northward out of Evesham, and then,
turning westward, rounds the many loops and twists of Avon in a long
curve. In a minute or so they were clear of the town, and the car
suddenly gathered speed. Tilda caught her breath and held tight; but
the pace did not seem to perturb the boy, who sat with his lips parted
and his gaze fixed ahead. As for Mr. Jessup, behind the shelter of the
wind-glass he was calmly preparing to sketch.

They had left the pastures behind, and were racing now through a land of
orchards and market gardens, ruled out and planted with plum trees and
cabbages in stiff lines that, as the car whirled past them, appeared to
be revolving slowly, like the spokes of a wheel. Below, on their left,
the river wandered--now close beneath them, now heading south and away,
but always to be traced by its ribbon of green willows. Thus they spun
past Wyre, and through Pershore--Pershore, set by the waterside, with
its plum orchards, and noble tower and street of comfortable red
houses--and crossed Avon at length by Eckington Bridge, under Bredon
Hill. Straight ahead of them now ran a level plain dotted with poplars,
and stretched--or seemed to stretch--right away to a line of heights,
far and blue, which Mr. Jessup (after questioning the chauffeur)
announced to be the Malverns.

At Bredon village just below, happening to pass an old woman in a red
shawl, who scurried into a doorway at the toot-toot of their horn, he
leant back and confided that the main drawback of this method of
sketching (he had discovered) was the almost total absence of middle
distance. He scarcely saw, as yet, how it could be overcome.

"But," said he thoughtfully, "the best way, after all, may be to ignore
it. When you come to consider, middle distance in landscape is more or
less of a convention."

Nevertheless Mr. Jessup frankly owned that his experiments so far
dissatisfied him.

"I'll get the first principles in time," he promised, "and the general
hang of it. Just now I'm being fed up with its limitations."

He sat silent for a while gazing ahead, where the great Norman tower and
the mill chimneys of Tewkesbury now began to lift themselves from the
plain. And coming to the Mythe Bridge, he called