difficult ascent, linked together with one of his
Alpine ropes. Gipsy was proud indeed as she stood at the top of a jagged
crag and waved her hand to Billy, who was taking a snapshot of the party
from below.

Poor Billy was liable to fits of dizziness since his attack of measles,
and was not allowed any real climbing, so he consoled himself by
following the others about with a Brownie camera, and photographing them
in the most dangerous-looking positions that he could catch.

"Billy must do some extra prints, and you could put them in the
Magazine," suggested Meg to Gipsy. "You could write an article on
'Mountaineering in Cumberland'. It would be grand, and would make Maude
Helm gnash her teeth with envy."

"Perhaps she's been doing something even more exciting to astonish us
with," laughed Gipsy. "I wish we could have climbed a real mountain,
like Skiddaw."

"Yes, there'd be some credit in that," commented Donald thoughtfully. He
said no more at the moment, but a few days afterwards, when the three
young people had set out on another cycling expedition, he had an
enterprising plan to unfold.

"I vote we ride as far as Ribblethwaite, leave our machines there, and
then climb Hawes Fell," he announced. "We've started so early we'd have
heaps and loads of time. It would be a thing worth doing! I didn't
broach the idea at home because I knew the Mater'd be in such a state of
mind, and think we were going to break our necks. It will be time enough
to tell about it when we come back. Are you two game to go?"

"Rather!" exclaimed both the girls rapturously.

Gipsy, with her Colonial bringing up and independent American ideas, did
not realize any necessity to ask permission for such an expedition. She
had been in far wilder places, and considered the Cumberland fells
civilized ground compared with portions of the Rockies and certain
mountainous tracts of New Zealand with which she was familiar.

If Meg had any qualms of conscience she contrived to quiet them with the
comforting assurance: "Dad would have taken us if he hadn't been busy at
his office, and we can manage so well ourselves now, we can get on all
right without him."

Ribblethwaite was a pretty little village about six miles away, a
typical north-country hamlet with its stone cottages, with mullioned
windows and flagged stone roofs, its grey turreted church tower, and its
quick-flowing, brawling river. It was well wooded, but it stood high,
and at this ear