"You are a very rude little girl, Pauline," she said; "it is excessively
ill-bred to play jokes upon people older than yourself. And as for
Larkin----"

But Larkin had disappeared, his shilling being earned, and some business
urgently needing his attendance.

Pauline slipped away to the garden, a resigned look upon her face. She
had not meant to be ill-bred; she had no idea she was playing a joke.
But she remembered now that Miss Bibby had several times swept down the
cards of Octavius that they had placed on the drawing-room mantelpiece
as a means of attracting any visitors' custom to Larkin. Still she need
not have spoken in that angry tone, and called her "ill-bred."
"Ill-bred" was a very uncomfortable word to have suddenly thrust upon
one. Pauline leapt up at the gymnastic bar, and swung and wriggled there
to shake it off.

Hot and perspiring after several brilliant efforts, that included
hanging by the feet, and swinging upwards again, and resuming the
perpendicular, Pauline climbed up and sat on the bar, holding to a post
and dangling her legs.

From here through a break in the trees she could see the hill, and
climbing up it steadily, steadily, Miss Bibby with her long precious
envelope for the post tucked beneath her arm.

CHAPTER XII

IN BLACK AND WHITE

Four days later Kate was reading, rocking and eating banana again in the
privacy of the little side verandah, when there came a familiar tramp
across the room behind her.

"It can't be Hugh," she said aloud, for it had been allowed by the whole
party that the seven days of a week were not too long to devote to the
thorough "doing" of the marvellous caves.

"By George though, can't it?" said that gentleman as he came through the
doorway, dropped his bag on one chair, and sat down heavily on another.

Kate laughed at him outright; his linen suit was red over with fine
dust, dust lay half an inch deep on the brim of his Panama, his very
eyebrows were red with the molecules of the mountain roads.

"Well, my girl," he said, "it was worth it--well worth it. Blessed be
motor-cars henceforth and forever, though hitherto I've never had a good
word to throw at one. Great Scott! to think of it; but for the chance of
one chap laying another fifty to a hundred that his car could do the
journey down in ten minutes under the other chap's, those girls would be
jabbering in my ears yet."

"But I thought they were such wonderful girls," said Kate amusedl