And we all went back to Denny, and the girls made a fuss with him. But Oswald and Dicky were grave and stood aloof. They were old enough to see that being good was all very well, but after all you had to get the boy home somehow.
When they said this, as agreeably as they could, Denny said--
‘It’s all right--someone will give me a lift.’
‘You think everything in the world can be put right with a lift,’ Dicky said, and he did not speak lovingly.
‘So it can,’ said Denny, ‘when it’s your feet. I shall easily get a lift home.’
‘Not here you won’t,’ said Alice. ‘No one goes down this road; but the high road’s just round the corner, where you see the telegraph wires.’
Dickie and Oswald made a sedan chair and carried Denny to the high road, and we sat down in a ditch to wait. For a long time nothing went by but a brewer’s dray. We hailed it, of course, but the man was so sound asleep that our hails were vain, and none of us thought soon enough about springing like a flash to the horses’ heads, though we all thought of it directly the dray was out of sight.
So we had to keep on sitting there by the dusty road, and more than one pilgrim was heard to say it wished we had never come. Oswald was not one of those who uttered this useless wish.
At last, just when despair was beginning to eat into the vital parts of even Oswald, there was a quick tap-tapping of horses’ feet on the road, and a dogcart came in sight with a lady in it all alone.
We hailed her like the desperate shipwrecked mariners in the long-boat hail the passing sail.
She pulled up. She was not a very old lady--twenty-five we found out afterwards her age was--and she looked jolly.
‘It’s this poor little boy,’ Dora said, pointing to the Dentist, who had gone to sleep in the dry ditch, with his mouth open as usual. ‘His feet hurt him so, and will you give him a lift?’
‘But why are you all rigged out like this?’ asked the lady, looking at our cockle-shells and sandals and things. We told her.
‘And how has he hurt his feet?’ she asked. And we told her that.
She looked very kind. ‘Poor little chap,’ she said. ‘Where do you want to go?’
We told her that too. We had no concealments from this lady.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have to go on to--what is its name?’