“But _why_ do you want to go?” asked Francis’ wife. She had installed herself in the oak-panelled morning-room; looked like a _blonde cendrée_ lily in the mellow gloom of its beeswaxed walls. “Just for a holiday,” prevaricated Peter; but he blushed faintly as he spoke. “Don’t English people ever tell the truth?” she said understandingly. He hesitated the fraction of a second before answering: “Very rarely—about that sort of thing.” Two days later, perfectly unconscious of the web which had been woven round her, Patricia yielded; and they started on the twelfth of June: two very ordinary people with two very ordinary suit-cases and a large luncheon-basket: he in white duck trousers, brogued buskin shoes, and flannel blazer; she in shantung coat and skirt, remnant of Lodden Lodge holidays—écru velours hat, Beatrice’s gift, shading her slumbrous eyes. . . . § 3 If you take punt at Hobbs’ Wharf, which banks the mill-creek beside Goring Lock; and glide out through some great morning of river-sunshine, under the white willows of “Nun’s Acre,” past Cleeve Lock ablaze with roses, into that long reach which runs lockless between oak and elm as far as Wallingford: (you will find at Molesey ferry a pleasant hostelry yclept “The Beetle and Wedge,” set a-purpose to hearten weary punters ere they pass under the almost ugliness of a red-brick railroad-causeway): and if, having rested at Wallingford, you pole on, by the narrow cleft of Benson’s Lock; and on, over the broad river-highway, through Shillingford; you will come in the fulness of even-time, past over-arching woods, to the vaulted spans of Clifton Hampden Bridge. . . . Clifton Hampden’s self is a village of honeysuckled cottages, and quiet lost housen of quiet lost gentlefolk who climb o’ Sundays to the belled Church which looks down on Clifton Hampden’s Bridge and Clifton Hampden’s “Barley Mow.” . . . But if you love our Thames, who is the father of England even as the sea is England’s great mother (and these twain mate in London Pool for all the world to see), you will not rest overlong at the “Barley Mow.” Father Thames will draw you on, against his own current, past Sutton Courtney’s foaming weirs and Wittenham’s “Plough,” and the mouth of the “Thame” (which is not the Thames, though it serpentines cunningly through flat fields to Dorchester, where, in an Abbey of olden stone, rest the bones of many a saint and many a Norman knight and dame); and on past Dorchester to Abingdon. . . . At Abingdon, rest you one night—even as Peter and Patricia rested—yet rest not over-late. For beyond Abingdon (and this is a glory of wood and waterland you shall scarce believe) Radley’s flag flaunts, bright as colours at a girl’s bosom, among the bosoming downs of English oak. . . . Yet even this glory, Father Thames—if he loves you—will bid you leave behind. It shall dwindle astern as the steady pole dives from your hand and the taut body presses you onwards. . . .