what she considered "slacking", and she kept a keen eye on
Lesbia for the rest of the hour, asking her questions whenever she
perceived any signs of straying attention.

Lesbia sketched her picture during geometry on the back page of her
exercise book, but it was a scratchy performance and quite unworthy of
her high ideals. She covered it hastily lest the mistress should see
it.

"If they'd only let us choose our own work at the High School I'd vote
for a life-class," she sighed, taking up her compasses and trying to
focus her wandering mind on circles and angles and letters of the
alphabet, instead of the outlines of the human form divine.

It was on the very next Saturday that Kitty, craving for the country,
and finding for once she had no particularly pressing engagement in
town, suggested a cycling excursion. She wanted her sister to go with
her, but Kingfield held superior attractions for Joan, who suggested
Lesbia as a substitute and promised to lend her her bicycle. It was all
arranged at the breakfast-table, and the two girls then and there cut
sandwiches, fetched the machines, oiled them, pumped tyres, strapped on
cycle-baskets, and started forth before ten o'clock. They rode first
through the suburbs, where foliage was yet unspoilt with dust from
motors, and the gardens were making a brave show of lilac, laburnum, and
pink hawthorn. Then by degrees the houses grew fewer, the kerbstones
disappeared, and the footpaths gave way to grassy borders; there were
unclipped hedges instead of ornamental railings, and fields, and woods,
and streams on the other side of them. Bird-life was at its zenith;
larks, so high as to be almost invisible, poured out torrents of
rapture; every apple tree seemed to have a blackbird soloist on a
topmost bough; wrens, linnets, and hedge-warblers fluttered and
twittered among low bushes, and flocks of jackdaws and rooks rose from
the fields in whirling flights. With one accord the girls rode fast.
There was an exaltation in free-wheeling down the hills, flying through
the air like birds. It almost gave them the sensation of wings. The
spell of spring was upon them, that curious thrill that comes to us as
we escape out of the circles of civilization and visit Mother Nature at
her busiest season, when every inch of her domain is a-throb with life.
It was pretty country in the neighbourhood of Kingfield, an undulating
landscape with large trees and lush meadows, and a slow river with bank