ey would
taste nothing more till midnight. There was something so delightfully
fresh and out of the common in having tea at a wayside inn; they felt
true pilgrims of the road, and civilization and school seemed to have
faded into a far background. The love of travel is in the blood of both
Celt and Anglo-Saxon; our forefathers visited shrines for the joy of the
journey as well as for religious motives, and maybe our Bronze Age
ancestors, who flocked to the great Sun Festivals at Stonehenge or
Avebury Circles, derived pleasure from the change of scene as well as a
blessing from the Druids. The Romans, those great pioneers of travel,
had opened out the district eighteen centuries ago, and laid a straight,
paved road from Wendcester to Pursborough; the remains of their
fortified camps and of their villas were still left to mark their era.
The foss-way, leading from Ryton-on-the-Heath to Dropwick, was their
handiwork, and our pilgrims were to march on the identical track of some
old Roman legion.

It must be owned that when tea was finished they were very unwilling
pilgrims, and would gladly have spent the night at The Pelican and have
slept in the funny, musty, low-ceiled little bedrooms upstairs.

"Couldn't we possibly stop here?" implored Verity.

But Miss Strong, having booked rooms in Dropwick, was adamant.

"Besides which I wouldn't trust the beds here," she remarked. "So early
in the year they're almost bound to be damp, and we don't want any of
you laid up with rheumatic fever as the result of our trip. I prefer to
give a wayside inn a week's notice if I mean to sleep there in April.
Nobody has had enough coal during the winter to keep fires going in
spare bedrooms. That front room was as chilly as a country church! You
won't feel so tired, Verity, when you're on your feet again, and it's
all downhill to Dropwick."

The Temperance Hotel, where the girls finally stayed their weary feet,
was quite modern and unromantic, though well aired and fairly
comfortable. Ingred, whom the fates had placed to sleep with Nora, had a
trying night, for her obstreperous bedfellow had a habit of flinging out
her arms, and of appropriating the larger half of the clothes, leaving
poor Ingred to wake shivering. Also, the bed sloped towards the middle,
so that both girls had to poise themselves on a kind of hillside, and
were constantly rolling down and colliding. These troubles, however,
were only incidental in the Pilgrimage, and c