lay out there. I'm a bit 'ot in the 'oof meself; but I can stick it if you can."
Dickie could; and when they made their evening camp in a deep gully soft with beech-leaves, and he looked out over the ridge—cautiously, because of keepers—at the smoothness of a mighty slope, green-grey in the dusk, where rabbits frisked and played, he was glad that he had not yielded to his tiredness and stopped to rest the night anywhere else. Chevering Park is a very beautiful place, I would have you to know. And the travellers were lucky. The dogs were good and quiet, and no keeper disturbed their rest or their masters. Dickie slept with True in his arms, and it was like a draught of soft magic elixir to lie once more in the still, cool night and look up at the stars through the trees.
"Can't think why they ever invented houses," he said, and then he fell asleep.
By short stages, enjoying every step of every day's journey, they went slowly and at their ease through the garden-land of Kent. Dickie loved every minute of it, every leaf in the hedge, every blade of grass by the roadside. And most of all he loved the quiet nights when he fell alseep under the stars with True in his arms.
It was all good, all. . . . And it was worth waiting and working for seven long months, to feel the thrill that Dickie felt when Beale, as they topped a ridge of the great South Downs, said suddenly, "There's the sea," and,
