Robert, however, became suddenly very stern. He advanced on Gregory with a
knife in his hand, and, swooping on the boot, cut both laces. "There," he
said, "get into bed, and you must buy some more laces at Cheltenham."

"I hate Cheltenham," said Gregory. But he said no more; he saw that Robert
was cross.

When, a little later, Janet took a plate of tongue over to his bunk, he was
fast asleep. The others had a dismal, grumpy meal, and they were glad when
the washing-up was done and it was bedtime. But no one had a good night.
The rain dropped from the trees on to the Slowcoach's roof with loud thuds,
and at midnight the thunder and lightning began, and Janet got up and
splashed out in the wet to the tent to ask Robert if they ought not to move
from under the trees. Robert had been lying awake thinking the same thing,
but Kink had gone off with Moses to the nearest farm, and the Slowcoach was
far too heavy to move without the horse. Diogenes whimpered on his chain.
If he could have spoken, he would have said, like Gregory, "I hate
thunder."

"Perhaps it won't get very near us," said Robert. "We must chance it, anyway."

But neither he nor Janet had any sleep until it was nearly time to get up,
when the sun began to shine again, and the miseries of the evening and
night before were forgotten.

Hester, however, had slept all through it, and had dreamed that ponies were
running away with her towards a country entirely peopled by black spaniels
and governed by a grey queen in top-boots.

As for Gregory, his dream was that he was Lord Bruce.