The sand blew into the girls' eyes and proved rather a bar to absolute enjoyment at this point. The mares' tails of the morning were driving madly across a high, ragged sky; the wind had come with a vengeance.
"Bother it!" growled Noreen, pushing her curly ends of hair out of her eyes for about the hundredth time. No plait that was made could keep Noreen's curly hair in absolute order. "Hard luck on the teams to have such a wind as this."
"It's equally bad for both, anyway," Gabrielle remarked. "And I'd back our side for pluck anywhere."
Miss Lambton was looking uneasily at the sky. "I hope it won't get much worse," she said.
But Gabrielle and Noreen had an optimistic spirit about a team captained by the great Ingrid Latimer, and refused to be really depressed by the weather on their account.
"Suppose that cousin of Joey's thinks it's too bad to play, and won't send her?" Noreen whispered tragically.
"I believe she'll come somehow--trust her," Gabrielle whispered back reassuringly. "Anyhow, we'll go as far as the reservoir, and see. If we climb up at the side of that we can get a splendid view."
By this time they were within a quarter of a mile of Deeping Royal. To their left was still the desolate shore, with the narrow strip of shingle separating them from it, but there was a great sense of nearness to the waves which the high wind was driving in big and threatening, with a crest of foam.
Before them, crowning the slight rise on which the village stood, were the great twin churches, standing not a stone's-throw apart, with their massive beacon-towers outlined sharply against a clear, wind-swept space in the sky.
Below them clustered the village, through which the procession of brakes drove up a rather steep street to the inn, which one reached through an incongruous ivy-hung gateway, bearing on one mouldering dim red pillar the name cut deeply "Good Hope."
The "sweet Anne Wendover," whom Roger Malfrey had wooed in vain, because "the wasting sickness" wooed her more successfully, had lived there; and he must have ridden often through those great gates, which now stood wide to _chars-à-bancs_ and brakes all the summer-time, and bore a large printed notice, "Teas provided."