IV + 

After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and unconsciously reckless, became deliberately daredevil and always with a backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said “How about it? Will this beat you?” + 

“A bicycling tour with Nan isn’t nearly so safe as the front trenches of my youth used to be,” Barry commented. “Those quiet, comfortable old days!” + 

There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried, or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle Paul’s; they were in journeyings often, in weariness often, in perils of waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. She was, in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas, and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before retiring. + 

Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally, bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less. + 

Then Kay chanted “Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,” and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge, waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short, all the symptoms common to his kind. + 

So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry bull. + 

“You look out you don’t fall, Gerda,” Kay flung back at her over his shoulder. “It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody’ll save you; nobody’ll dare.” + 

“Feeling unsteady?” Barry’s gentler voice asked her from behind. “Get off and walk it. I will too.” + 

But Gerda rode on, her eyes on Nan’s swift, sure progress ahead. Barry should not see her mettle fail; Barry, who had been through the war and would despise cowards. + 

They reached the end of the hedge, and the path ran off it into a field. And between this field and the last one there was an open gap, through which the bull of Basan lumbered with fierce eyes and stood waiting for them to descend. + 

“I don’t like that creature,” Kay said. “I’m afraid of him. Aren’t you, Barry?” + 

“Desperately,” Barry admitted. “Anyone would be, except Nan, of course.” + 

Nan was bicycling straight along the field path, and the bull stood staring at her, his head well down, in readiness, as Gerda saw, to charge. But he did not charge Nan. Bulls and other ferocious beasts think it waste of time to charge the fearless; they get no fun out of an unfrightened victim. He waited instead for Gerda, as she knew he would do. + 

Kay followed Nan, still chanting his psalm. Gerda followed Kay. As she dropped from the hedge onto the path she turned round once and met Barry’s eyes, her own wide and grave, and she was thinking “I can bear anything if he is behind me and sees it happen. I couldn’t bear it if I were the last and no one saw.” To be gored all alone, none to care⁠ ⁠… who could bear that? + 

The next moment Barry was no longer behind her, but close at her side, bicycling on the grass by the path, between her and the bull. Did he know she was frightened? She hadn’t shown it, surely. + 

“The wind,” said Gerda, in her clear, small crystalline voice, “has gone round more to the south. Don’t you think so?” And reminded Barry of a French aristocrat demoiselle going with calm and polite conversation to the scaffold. + 

“I believe it has,” he said, and smiled. + 

And after all the bull, perhaps not liking the look of the bicycles, didn’t charge at all, but only ran by their sides with snorting noises until they left him behind at the next gate. + 

“Did you,” enquired Gerda, casually, “notice that bull? He was an awfully fine one, wasn’t he?” + 

“A remarkably noble face, I thought,” Kay returned. + 

They scrambled down cliffs to the cove and bathed. + 