It was some time before the caravan was adjusted to the complete satisfaction of the Professor. But at last it was done, and the end door gaped at the whole prospect of the Weald with the steps hanging out idiotically like a tongue. The hind wheels were stayed up very cleverly by lumps of chalk and chunks of yew, living and dead, and certainly the effect of it was altogether taller and better. And then the preparations for the midday cooking began. The Professor was full of acute ideas about camping and cooking, and gave Bealby a lively but instructive time. There was no stream handy, but William was sent off to the hotel to fetch a garden water-cart that the Professor with infinite foresight had arranged should be ready. The Geedges held aloof from these preparations,—they were unassuming people; Miss Philips concentrated her attention upon the Weald—it seemed to Bealby a little discontentedly—as if it was unworthy of her—and Mrs. Bowles hovered smoking cigarettes over her husband’s activities, acting great amusement. “You see it pleases me to get Himself busy,” she said. “You’ll end a Camper yet, Darlint, and us in the hotel.” The Professor answered nothing, but seemed to plunge deeper into practicality. Under the urgency of Professor Bowles Bealby stumbled and broke a glass jar of marmalade over some fried potatoes, but otherwise did well as a cook’s assistant. Once things were a little interrupted by the Professor going off to catch a cricket, but whether it was the right sort of cricket or not he failed to get it. And then with three loud reports—for a moment Bealby thought the mad butlers from Shonts were upon him with firearms—Captain Douglas arrived and got off his motor bicycle and left it by the roadside. His machine accounted for his delay, for those were the early days of motor bicycles. It also accounted for a black smudge under one of his bright little eyes. He was fair and flushed, dressed in oilskins and a helmet-shaped cap and great gauntlets that made him, in spite of the smudge, look strange and brave and handsome, like a Crusader—only that he was clad in oilskin and not steel, and his moustache was smaller than those Crusaders wore; and when he came across the turf to the encampment Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Geedge both set up a cry of “A-_Ah_!” and Miss Philips turned an accusing face upon those two ladies. Bealby knelt with a bunch of knives and forks in his hand, laying the cloth for lunch, and when he saw Captain Douglas approaching Miss Philips, he perceived clearly that that lady had already forgotten her lowly adorer, and his little heart was smitten with desolation. This man was arrayed like a chivalrous god, and how was a poor Bealby, whose very collar, his one little circlet of manhood, had been reft from him, how was he to compete with this tremendousness? In that hour the ambition for mechanism, the passion for leather and oilskin, was sown in Bealby’s heart.