“Pretty good goin’, I should call it,” Mr. Bossom assured her cheerfully.  “Six locks we’ve passed while you was asleep, not countin’ the stop-lock.  But maybe you ’re not used to travel by canal?”

“I thank the Lord, no; or I’d never ’ave put Mr.  ’Ucks up to it.  Why, I’d walk it quicker, crutch an’ all.”

“What’d you call a reas’nable price for eggs, now—­at this time o’ year?” asked Mr. Bossom, abstractedly sucking the stump of a pencil and frowning at his notebook.  But of a sudden her words seemed to strike him, and he looked up round-eyed.

“You ain’t tellin’ me you put this in ’Ucks’s mind?”

“’Course I did,” owned Tilda proudly.

“An’ got me sent to Stratford-on-Avon!” Mr. Bossom added.  “Me that stood your friend when you was in a tight place!”

“No, I didn’.  It was ’Ucks that mentioned Stratford—­said you’d find a cargo of beer there, which sounded all right:  an’ Mortimer jumped at it soon as ever he ’eard the name.  Mortimer said it was the dream of his youth an’ the perspiration of his something else—­I can’t tell the ezact words; but when he talked like that, how was I to guess there was anything wrong with the place?”

“There ain’t anything wrong wi’ the place, that I know by,” Mr. Bossom admitted.

“But I remember another thing he said, because it sounded to me even funnier.  He said, ’Sweet swan of Avon upon the banks of Thames, that did so please Eliza and our James.’  Now what did he mean by that?”

Mr. Bossom considered and shook his head.

“Some bank-’oliday couple, I reckon; friends of his, maybe.  But about that swan—­Mortimer must ‘a-been talkin’ through his hat.  Why to get to the Thames that bird’d have to go up the Stratford-on-Avon to Kingswood cut, down the Warwick an’ Birmingham to Budbrooke—­with a trifle o’ twenty-one locks at Hatton to be worked or walked round; cross by the Warwick an’ Napton—­another twenty-two locks; an’ all the way down the Oxford Canal, which from Napton is fifty miles good.”

“She’d be an old bird before she got there, at our pace,” Tilda agreed.  “But, o’ course, Mr. Bossom, if we want to get to Stratford quick, an’ you don’t, you’ll make the pace what you like an’ never mind us.”

“Who said I didn’ want to get to Stratford?” he asked almost fiercely, and broke off with a groan.

“Oh, it’s ’ard!—­it’s ‘ard! . . .  And me sittin’ here calcilatin’ eggs an’ milk domestic-like and thinkin’ what bliss . . .  But you don’t understand.  O’ course you don’t.  Why should you?”

Tilda placed her hands behind her back, eyed him for half-a-minute, and sagely nodded.

“Well, I never!” she said.  “Oh, my goodness gracious mercy me!”

“I can’t think what you ‘re referrin’ to,” stammered Mr. Bossom.

“So we’re in love, are we?”

He cast a guilty look around.