Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/455

 Thenceforward that not uninspiriting air became the motif of our progress. We never tired of it. Whenever our conversation flagged, by tacit consent Mr. Rowley pieced his flageolet together and started it. The horses lilted it out in their gallop: the harness jingled, the postilions tittupped to it. And the presto with which it wound up as we came to a post-house and a fresh relay of horses, had to be heard to be believed.

So with the chaise windows open to the vigorous airs of spring, and my own breast like a window flung wide to youth and health and happy expectations, I rattled home wards; impatient as a lover should be, yet not too impatient to taste the humour of spinning like a lord, with a pocketful of money, along the road which the ci-devant M. Champdivers had so fearfully dodged and skirted in Burchell Fenn's covered cart.

And yet so impatient, that when we galloped over the Calton Hill and down into Edinburgh by the new London road, with the wind in our faces and a sense of April in it, brisk and jolly, I must pack off Rowley to our lodgings with the valises, and stay only for a wash and breakfast at Dumbreck's before posting on to Swanston alone.

Where the gables of the cottage rose into view over the hill's shoulder I dismissed my driver and walked forward, whistling the tune: but fell silent as I came under the lee of the garden wall, and sought for the exact spot of my old escalade. I found it by the wide beechen branches over the road, and hoisted myself noiselessly up to the coping, where, as before, they screened me—or would have screened me had I cared to wait.