Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/191



or two after the journey to Marblehead Brenda one afternoon started off on her bicycle.

“Don’t go very far, Brenda,” said her mother. “It’s rather warm, and I don’t like to have you start off alone so late in the day.”

“Oh, Nora’s coming, too,” and Nora wheeled into sight as she spoke, “and we ’re only going a little beyond the  cross-roads. We ’ll not be gone an hour.”

“Very well,” replied Mrs. Barlow, “I don’t want Nora to run the risk of getting overheated, or anything of that kind while she is here visiting,”

Now Nora and Brenda, as they started off on their bicycles, seemed to be in high spirits. It was easy to read this in their faces, and had any one met them before they  turned into the main road, they might have been heard  singing a lively duet. Perhaps, however, if any one had met them, the girls would have stopped their singing. Yet I think that the echo would have reached the ears of even  an absent-minded fellow-traveller.

“Do you think that we really ought to do it?” asked Nora, when they had gone half a mile.

“Why not? There’s no real harm in it. It is n’t one of the things we ’ve ever been forbidden to do.”