"Then perhaps you have the advantage, after all. Just think--you can eat them all yourself!" "They're too many for one person. I say, won't you have some?" "That would be a shame." "Oh no--do have some. I hate eating alone--and I'm awfully hungry." She began to unstrap the parcel from her carrier. "This is a dusty place for a picnic," said Nigel, "let's go down the lane to Brambletye, and eat them there." The idea and the words came almost together. He did not pause to think how funny it was that he should suddenly want to go for a picnic with a school-girl of sixteen. It seemed quite natural, somehow. However, he could not help being a little dismayed at his own boldness. This girl would freeze up at once if by any chance he betrayed who he really was. As for her people--but the thought of their scandalised faces was an incitement rather than otherwise. "Where's Brambletye?" asked Tony. "Don't you know it?--it's the ruin at the bottom of that lane. You must have passed it often." "I've never been down the lane--only along the road in the car." "And you live so near! Why, I've often been to Brambletye, and I live much further away than you." "Where do you live?" This was a settler, to which Nigel had laid himself open by his enthusiasm. He decided to face the situation boldly. "I live over in Surrey--at a place called Fan's Court." "Fan's Court," she repeated vaguely. "I don't think I've heard of it." "Oh, it's a long way from you--beyond Blindly Heath--and only a little place. I'm not very well off, you know." She glanced at his shabby clothes, and felt embarrassed, for she saw that he had noticed the glance. He picked up the litter from the roadside, and began to wheel her bicycle down the hill. "I say," she breathed softly, "this is an adventure." So it was--for both, in very different ways. For her it was an incursion into lawlessness. Her father was tremendously particular, even her girl friends had to pass the censor before intimacy was allowed, and as for men--why, she had never really known a man in her life, and here she was, picnicing with one her parents had never seen! Nigel was in exactly the opposite position--he was adventuring into law and respectability. He was with a girl, a school-girl, of the upper middle classes, to whom he was simply a rather poverty-stricken country gentleman--to whom his disgrace was unknown, who admitted him to her society on equal terms, ignorant of the barriers that divided them. He looked down at her as she walked by his side, her soft hair freckled with light, her eyes bright with her thrills--and a faint glow came into his cheeks, a faint flutter to his pulses, nothing fierce or mighty, but a great quiet surge that seemed to pass over him like the sea, and leave him stranded in simplicity.