steady?" Barry's gentler voice asked her from behind. "Get off
and walk it. I will too."

But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan's swift, sure progress ahead. Barry
should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and
would despise cowards.

They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field.
And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through
which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for
them to descend.

"I don't like that creature," Kay said. "I'm afraid of him. Aren't you,
Barry?"

"Desperately," Barry admitted. "Anyone would be, except Nan, of course."

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood
staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to
charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think
it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an
unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would
do.

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she
dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met
Barry's eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking "I can
bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn't bear
it if I were the last and no one saw." To be gored all alone, none to
care ... who could bear that?

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side,
bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know
she was frightened? She hadn't shown it, surely.

"The wind," said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, "has gone
round more to the south. Don't you think so?" And reminded Barry of a
French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to
the scaffold.

"I believe it has," he said, and smiled.

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles,
didn't charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises
until they left him behind at the next gate.

"Did you," enquired Gerda, casually, "notice that bull? He was an awfully
fine one, wasn't he?"

"A remarkably noble face, I thought," Kay returned.

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed.

5

Nan, experienced in such things, as one is at the age of thirty-three if
one has led a well-spent life, knew now beyond peradventure what had
happened to Barry and what would never happen again between him and h