On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring but enthralling plan. Edwin put the proposal before Mr. Ingleby, and was surprised to find that he didn’t object. Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin for several months that his father was curiously distrait and less interested than usual in his work. This consent freed his conscience, and the two friends set off together on a Saturday afternoon in the spirit of abandoned holiday that is the highest privilege of youth. They had decided to take no medical books with them. As far as they were concerned, the examination might go hang; for a whole week they would live with no thought for the morrow, taking long rides over the Cotswolds, lunching at village inns on bread and cheese, returning at night to feasts of beans and bacon and libations of Overton cider. They started from the infirmary at half-past two, and had soon left the dust and tram-lines of North Bromwich behind. The smooth, wide road that they followed stretched in magnificent undulations over the heights of the Midland plateau from which they could see the shapes of Uffdown and Pen Beacon fading into the west under a pale, black-country sky. In front of them southward the sky was blue. “We’re in for ripping weather,” Boyce shouted as he rode ahead. The weather didn’t really matter: they were in for a great adventure. From the plateau they glided swiftly to the vale of Redditch, and when they had left that sordid little town behind they climbed the backbone of the Ridgway, where the road follows the thin crest of a line of small hills and overlooks on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly scattered with dark woodlands that no human habitation could be seen. They were as lonely as the sky. Westward of Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales; but Boyce appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the confidant of his latest romance. “She and I,” he said, “used to bicycle out from Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an hour and a half’s easy ride. It was early last summer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We used to sit on a gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark. I can tell you it was pretty wonderful.” Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be wonderful in this enchanted country. Riding along in the afternoon sunlight Edwin constructed for himself just such another passionate adventure; and the figure with which he shared these imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy Powys. While the dream nightingales were singing their hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable kiss, they came to a cottage half timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle where a steep road fell on either side at right angles to the ridge. “Right,” shouted Boyce, “we’ll take the road down through the Lenches.”