They passed along a crooked, hilly street――the main street of the town――and on to the high road. A duck waddled by, quacking discontentedly of family matters. Grave, mild-eyed cows, black and brown and white, looked at them solemnly, and a boy stood rattling a pail against a wooden trough. He smiled at Ann. Ann was interested in the boy, and Pouncer in the cows, but both were obliged to hurry after Aunt Caroline and Grif, who were now fifty yards ahead. They turned to the right, down a green beechen lane, and Ann and Pouncer straggled behind. There were cool green places under the hedges, with thick long grass for resting on; there were cool bluish shadows under the dark, pink-flowered chestnut-trees; but Grif and Aunt Caroline passed them by. And one of Ann’s bootlaces was draggling on the ground, and Pouncer’s tongue was lolling out. It seemed to Ann that Aunt Caroline was simply flying. Grif was big and could keep up with her, but Ann felt that she was getting hotter and hotter and would soon have to stop. The difficulty was that Aunt Caroline never looked behind. Grif, who was usually so quiet, was talking to her just as if he were trying to make up for all his past silences. Ann might have attracted their attention by a vocal appeal, but for a long time she could not summon up courage to make the attempt. “Grif!” she at last piped plaintively in a very small voice, smaller even than usual, and Grif did not hear. The corners of Ann’s mouth drooped. Her other lace had become untied. Her fat legs dragged with increasing slowness. Pouncer, suddenly forgetting his own fatigue, began to worry her laces, to get in her way, to pretend her laces were rats; and Ann’s tears were welling dangerously near the surface when Aunt Caroline turned round. She stopped at once. “Good gracious, child, whatever’s the matter?” “I’m so hot!” Ann quavered. Aunt Caroline laughed, but it was a comfortable, pleasant laugh, and Ann, who never counted much on sympathy, didn’t mind it. “We can rest here, if you like,” Aunt Caroline said, sitting down under the thick hedge. “And we’ve only a very little farther to go now.” “You _would_ walk,” cried Grif. “You always will do things.” “I wanted to walk,” Ann replied. “Why shouldn’t I walk as well as you?” “But you see you can’t.” “I can.” Her plaintive note had slipped already into the firmer tone of argument. Grif shrugged his shoulders. He knelt down and tied her laces for her, while Pouncer, seeing how things were going, dropped into a doze. The air was a floating haze of dusty gold, which turned to green among the trees. The bees boomed in the dog-roses: the sky was cloudless. The tree-trunks showed almost black in the hot light, and the leaves, pale and semi-transparent, quivered, altered, taking strange forms, so that what Grif saw was now a tree, now a spirit. In the green grass the shadows made islands of a deeper green.