“I’m waiting here for cake,” I said.

“Bother, I forgot the cake.”

“Look here, this picnic isn’t going with the swing that one had looked for.  No pemmican, no cake, no early Norman church.  We might almost as well be back in the Cromwell Road.”

“Does your whole happiness depend on cake?” asked Myra scornfully.

“To a large extent it does.  Archie,” I called out, “there’s no cake.”

Archie stopped patting the car and came over to us.  “Good.  Let’s begin,” he said; “I’m hungry.”

“You didn’t hear.  I said there wasn’t any cake—­on the contrary, there is an entire absence of it, a shortage, a vacuum, not to say a lacuna.  In the place where it should be there is an aching void or mere hard-boiled eggs or something of that sort.  I say, doesn’t anybody mind, except me?”

Apparently nobody did, so that it was useless to think of sending Archie back for it.  Instead, I did a little wrist-work with the corkscrew....

“Now,” said Archie, after lunch, “before you all go off with your butterfly nets, I’d better say that we shall be moving on at about half-past three.  That is, unless one of you has discovered the slot of a Large Cabbage White just then, and is following up the trail very keenly.”

“I know what I’m going to do,” I said, “if the flies will let me alone.”

“Tell me quickly before I guess,” begged Myra.

“I’m going to lie on my back and think about—­who do you think do the hardest work in the world?”

“Stevedores.”

“Then I shall think about stevedores.”

“Are you sure,” asked Simpson, “that you wouldn’t like me to show you that signalling now?”

I closed my eyes.  You know, I wonder sometimes what it is that makes a picnic so pleasant.  Because all the important things, the eating and the sleeping, one can do anywhere.

IV.—­IN THE WET

Myra gazed out of the window upon the driving rain and shook her head at the weather.

“Ugh!” she said.  “Ugly!”

“Beast,” I added, in order that there should be no doubt about what we thought.  “Utter and deliberate beast.”

We had arranged for a particularly pleasant day.  We were to have sailed across to the mouth of the—­I always forget its name, and then up the river to the famous old castle of-of-no, it’s gone again; but anyhow, there was to have been a bathe in the river, and lunch, and a little exploration in the dinghy, and a lesson in the Morse code from Simpson, and tea in the woods with a real fire, and in the cool of the evening a ripping run home before the wind.  But now the only thing that seemed certain was the cool of the evening.

“We’ll light a fire and do something indoors,” said Dahlia.

“This is an extraordinary house,” said Archie.  “There isn’t a single book in it, except a lot of Strand Magazines for 1907.  That must have been a very wet year.”