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dark narrow flowery lane. No sign of him.
    Faster and faster she ran crying “Harry” at every bend; but every bend showed only the white ruts and the clutched fingers of the rose branches overhead and the red spikes of the nightshade laughing at her from the deep grass banks. She shot out of the lane onto Gypsies’ Hill. But the gypsies were gone.
    Their fire smoked white ash. There was a good deal of rubbish left. But the vans and cans and the pony and the line of washing might never have been. GYPSIES PROHIBITED spoke out from the post, and the gypsies were gone.
    And so was Harry.
    â€œHarry! Harry!” his mother shouted. He couldn’t have got this far so fast. She ran and ran—still no Harry. Past the pub and the cluster of houses and into Jingling Lane and still no Harry. Oh, she thought, Harry gagged and bound. Away with the gypsies. He loves gypsies. “Good day my lovely,” they’d said, and he’d waved and said hello.
    â€œHARRY,” she shrieked and ran down Jingling Lane and into the village lane and into the village, sure now that Harry’s short legs could not have got this far alone. “KIDNAPPED,” she shrieked at Jimmie Meccer, who blinked and pointed.
    For there he was—and so were the Teesdales and old Grandad Hewitson laughing, and Jimmie Meccer laughing, tottering and peeping from his shed, and the four proud upset hens putting their necks out of the hedge again and village people waking up as it grew cooler and looking out round curtains to
see
what the noise was about, and the blood-red lupins standing watching and Mrs. Teesdale in her sugar-pink holiday hat.
    As Mrs. Bateman puffed up, the car with the rest of the Batemans came over the bridge too and Harry rather tended to wander out of sight again when he saw his father coming.
    But somehow all was laughter.
    â€œYou never—you never went asking favours at Blue Barns’,” said Mr. Teesdale. “Dearie me—it’s prayers only there on a Sunday. None the worse I dare say, but it’s not a place for jollifications.”
    â€œShe was
awful
. She said she’d give us tea and then she wouldn’t let us pay. And she said she’d give us eggs but it was a sin if we paid before tomorrow. She just let us make mistakes. She
watched
us making mistakes. She enjoyed us making mistakes. Harry was dreadful. She brought out dreadful things in him. You’d not believe—I just don’t understand people up here.”
    â€œYou understand
us
,” said Mrs. Teesdale, “and you’re coming in for a proper tea and some eggs in boxes.” Which they did, and the milk didn’t taste of meat and the butter wasn’t marg and there was the most tremendous lot to talk about.
    â€œShould we ask Jimmie Meccer in?” said Mr. Teesdale.
    â€œThat we will not,” said his wife. “Letting them go asking favours of that witch.”
    â€œYou’d best take a scrubbing brush with you,” said Mrs. Teesdale as they left, “unless you’ve got one up there at Light Trees. Harry’ll need it tomorrow when he goes back to scrub her path—though she’ll have done it by then herself of course.”
    â€œShe will,” said Grandad Hewitson. “First stroke after Sunday midnight she’ll be out on her knees on them stones.”
    â€œHow much for the eggs?” asked Mrs. Bateman.
    â€œTell you later,” said Mrs. Teesdale.
    Back at Light Trees, late in the long light evening, Harry was singing happily on the horse rake and his parents were hanging over the sheep pens, watching the sun go down behind the Castle Farm below, where the Lord of the Marches must have seen it sometimes too, looking much as it did tonight, and said as they did, “What a day it has been—and I’d think it would be hot again tomorrow.” Perhaps the mother and child curled up under the bridge had sometimes said the