“I’ve come from Wild Duck. Harriet had gone to Witham--perhaps you saw her--so I went over to have lunch with Wiggie, and as I knew the car would be out again to-night, I said I’d walk back. It’s not so far, and I meant to be home long before dark. However, Harriet was late in coming in, and I didn’t like to leave Cyril alone with Stubbs (the nurse was resting, and Stubbs talks him to death), so tea was over before I got away. It was still light, then, but very wet and blowing hard, so Harriet told Stubbs to see me home, and we started off, but we hadn’t got far before he announced that he wanted to call at Rakestraw. He’d got it into his head that it would do Wiggie good to go out in a bath-chair, with himself to push, and he knew they had a bath-chair at Rakestraw, which he meant to borrow. I asked him if he couldn’t go some other time, but he said no. No time like the present was his motto. It had been his father’s motto. In fact, it was in the family. Always in the family. I said that Wiggie might not care about a bath-chair, but that, if he did, Father would hire him the latest pattern from Manchester, but he wouldn’t hear of that; and when finally I suggested that he should go chair-hunting by himself and let me go home, he wouldn’t hear of that, either. He said that, coming from a town, I must naturally know all about bath-chair charges, and he would want me to tell him what to pay if he couldn’t get it borrowed. If I wouldn’t help, he’d have to call for advice at the ‘White Lion,’ so for Harriet’s sake I went. The Rakestraw people dug the chair out of the barn, and said they’d be delighted to lend it, and Stubbs was so overjoyed that he started practising on it at once, with Newby’s daughter as passenger. He’d evidently forgotten all about me, so when I was thoroughly tired and chilled to the bone I slipped out, hoping he’d go on practising until I was safely away. Unfortunately, I took the wrong turning and had to ask the road, as I didn’t dare to go back. A boy told me to keep on up the ginnel, and I’d strike a gate opening on to the main road, so I rushed on without taking much notice where I was going, until I’d lost the farm and everything else as well. It was getting dark, by then, and every bush looked exactly like every other bush, and I suppose I went on walking round them, as I never found the gate at all. I ginnelled and ginnelled and ginnelled _and_ ginnelled, but nothing ever ended anywhere. I found all sorts of glades and walls and little woods and streams I’d never seen or dreamed of before, and that I’m perfectly sure are not there at all in the daytime, but there was no way out. I felt just as if I were bewitched, and all the bushes seemed like little stunted men jeering and leering; and when it got quite dark I was properly lost altogether. I was just getting ready to die and deciding what I meant to say about Stubbs at the Judgment, when young Newby ginnelled up and found me. He’d thought he’d seen me