hot potful of smouldering wood ashes was set on the table; cups and
saucers and goats' milk were also supplied to them, and opaque
beet-root sugar. The food they had brought in their baskets, big new
_broodje_ split in half, buttered and put together again with a
slither of Dutch cheese between. These and, to wind up with, some thin
sweet biscuits carried in a papier-mache box, and handed out singly by
Vrouw Van Heigen, who had brought them as a surprise and a treat.

"Do they have such picnics as this in England?" Anna asked, as she
gathered up the crumbs of her biscuit.

"I have never been to one," Julia answered, and inwardly she thought
of her mother and Violet driving in a wheeled ark to the wood, there
to sit at little wooden tables and stretch their mouths in the public
eye.

"Ah!" said Vrouw Snieder; "then it is all the more of a pleasure and a
novelty to you."

Julia said it was, and soon afterwards they rose from the table to
walk in the wood. The two elder ladies did not get far, and before
long came back to sit on their wooden chairs again. The girls went
some little distance, all keeping together, and being careful not to
wander out of sight and sound of the other picnic parties. Once when
they came to the extreme limit of their walk, Julia half-hesitated.
She looked into the quiet green distance. It would be easy to leave
them, to give them the slip; she could walk at double their pace with
half their exertion, she could lose herself among the trees while
they were wondering why she had gone, and making up their minds to
follow her; and, most important of all, when she came back she could
explain everything quite easily, so that they would not think it in
the least strange--an accident, a missing of the way, anything. Should
she do it--should she? The wild creature that had lived half-smothered
within her for all the twenty years of her life fluttered and stirred.
It had stirred before, rebelling against the shams of the Marbridge
life, as it rebelled against the restrictions of the present; it had
never had scope or found vent; still, for all that it was not dead;
possibly, even, it was growing stronger; it called her now to run
away. But she did not do it; advisability, the Polkingtons' patron
saint, suggested to her that one does not learn to shine in the caged
life by allowing oneself the luxury of occasional escape.

She turned her back on the green distance. "Shall we not go back to
where the