As Kitty and Dan lingered now by the gate to look at her, they saw
Dumble, the driver, lovingly passing a cloth over her, as though to wipe
the perspiration from her iron forehead, while Tonkin, the fireman,
stood leaning against her, with his arm caressingly outstretched.
Behind Dan and Kitty, on the farther side of the road, grew a high
hawthorn hedge, under the shelter of which was a seat where people sat
and sunned themselves by the hour, and at the same time gazed at the
life and bustle with which the wharf woke up now and then. There were
two old men on the seat now. They touched their hats to Dan and his
sister, and with a melancholy shake of their old heads sighed in
sympathy with Kitty as she cried, "O Dan, I wish we could all go by
train, all the way to Wenbridge. It will be perfectly lovely down the
line."

But Dan seemed less eager than Kitty or the old men. "We shall reach
the woods before they do, if we walk on," he said, moving away;
"and there is such a lot to see on the way."

Tony and Betty--who was carrying the basket because she felt she could
trust no one else with it--were nearly out of sight, so Dan and Kitty
hurried after them. One side of the road was lined by fields, the other
by houses, and at the foot of their gardens ran the railway line until
it emerged through some allotment gardens on to the open road, after
which, for a while, train and foot passengers, and sometimes a drover,
with a herd of cattle, meandered along side by side in pleasant talk or
lively dispute--the latter usually, when Dan was on the road--until,
about a mile farther on, two more cottages, and the last, having been
passed, the road came to an abrupt end, and only the railway was left,
with a rough footpath along its edge, which pedestrians had worn for
themselves.