the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking
horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the
semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while
bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to
the hands. So brakeless, she zig-zagged like greased lightning to the
bottom.

It was on the second day, on the long hill that runs from Manaccan down
to Helford Ferry, that Gerda suddenly took her brakes off and shot after
her. That hill is not a badly spiralling one, but it is long and steep
and usually ridden with brakes. And just above Helford village it has one
very sharp turn to the left.

Nan, standing waiting for the others on the bridge, looked round and saw
Gerda shooting with unrestrained wheels and composed face round the last
bend. She had nearly swerved over at the turn, but not quite. She got off
at the bridge.

"Hullo," said Nan. "Quicker than usual, weren't you?" She had a
half-grudging, half-ironic grin of appreciation for a fellow sportsman,
the same grin with which she had looked up at her from the sea at
Cadgwith. Nan liked daring. Though it was in her, and she knew that it
was in her, to hate Gerda with a cold and deadly anger, the sportsman
in her gave its tribute. For what was nothing and a matter of ordinary
routine to her, might be, she suspected, rather alarming to the quiet,
white-faced child.

Then the demon of mischief leapt in her. If Gerda meant to keep the pace,
she should have a pace worth keeping. They would prove to one another
which was the better woman, as knights in single combat of old proved it,
or fighters in the ring to-day. As to Barry, he should look on at it,
whether he liked it or not.

Barry and Kay rushed up to them, and they went through the little
thatched rose-sweet hamlet to the edge of the broad blue estuary and
shouted for the ferry.

4

After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and
unconsciously reckless, became deliberately dare-devil and always with a
backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said "How about it? Will this
beat you?"

"A bicycling tour with Nan isn't nearly so safe as the front trenches of
my youth used to be," Barry commented. "Those quiet, comfortable old
days!"

There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried,
or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle
Paul's; they were in journeyings often, in wea