In a couple of strides the water was below his knees. Soon he was standing on a pebbly beach at the nose of the promontory formed by the bend where the accident had happened. In order to lower Cynthia to the ground without bringing her muslin flounces in contact with his dripping clothes he had to stoop somewhat. Her hair brushed his forehead, his eyes, his lips, as he lifted her down. His hands rested for an instant on the warm softness of her neck and shoulders. His heart leaped in a mad riot of joy at the belief that she would have uttered no protest if he had drawn her nearer instead of setting her decorously on her feet. He dared not look at her, but turned and gazed at the river.

“Thank God, that is over!” he said.

Cynthia heard something in his voice then that was absent when they were both in peril of being swept away by the silent rush of the black stream.

“Quite an adventure,” she sighed, stooping to feel the hem of her frock.

“You are not wet?” he asked, after a pause.

“Not a thread. The water barely touched my feet. How prompt you were! I suppose men who fight have often to decide quickly like that… What caused it? A whole seam was torn open.”

“It cannot be a stake. Such a thing would not be permitted to exist in this river… A snag probably. Some old tree stump undermined by last month’s heavy rain.”

“What of the boat? Is it lost?”

“No. It will be found easily enough in the morning. The damage is trifling. How splendid you were!”

“Please don’t. I haven’t said a word to you, and I don’t mean to.”

“But – ”

“Well, say it, if you must.”

“I am not going to compliment you in the ordinary terms. Just this – nature intended you to be a soldier’s bride, Miss Vanrenen.”

“Nature, being feminine, may promise that which she does not always mean to carry out. Besides, I don’t know many soldiers… It is charming here, by the river’s edge, but I must remember that you are soaked to the skin. Where are we, exactly?”

“About four miles from the hotel, by water: perhaps a mile and three-quarters as the crow flies.”

“How far as a girl walks?”

“Let us try,” he said briskly. “We seem to have landed in a meadow. If we cross it, all my efforts to save that muslin frock will count as naught, since there is sure to be a heavy dew on the grass after this fine day. Suppose we follow the bank a little way until we reach some sort of a path. Will you take my hand?”

“No, I need both hands to hold up my dress. But you might grab my arm. I am wearing French shoes, which are not built for clambering over rocks.”

Cynthia was adroit. The use of one small word had relieved the situation. Medenham might hold her arm with the utmost tenderness, but so long as he was “grabbing” it there was nothing more to be said.

He piloted her to a narrow strip of turf that bordered the Wye, found a path that ran close to a small wood, and soon they were in a road. There was slight excuse for arm-holding now, but Cynthia seemed to think that her frills still needed safeguarding, so he did not withdraw the hand which clung to her elbow.

A light in a laborer’s cottage promised information; he knocked at the door, which was not opened, but a voice cried:

“Who is it? What do you want?”

“Tell me the nearest way to the Symon’s Yat Hotel, please,” said Medenham.

“Keep straight on till you come to the ferry. If the boat is on this side you can pull yourself across.”

“But if it is not?”

“You must chance it. The nearest bridge is a mile the other way.”

“By gad!” said Medenham under his breath.

“I wouldn’t care a pin if Mrs. Devar wasn’t waiting for me,” whispered Cynthia, whose mental attitude during this mishap on the Wye contrasted strangely with her alarm when Marigny’s motor collapsed on the Mendips.

“Mrs. Devar is the real problem,” laughed Medenham. “We must find some means of soothing her agitation.”

“Why don’t you like her?”

“That is one of the things I wish to explain later.”

“She has been horrid to you, I know, but – ”

“I am beginning to think that I owe her a debt of gratitude I can never repay.”

“What will happen if that wretched ferryboat is on the wrong side of the river?”

Medenham took her arm again, for the road was dark where there were trees.

“You are not to think about it,” he said. “I have been doing all the talking to-night. Now tell me something of your wanderings abroad.”

These two already understood each other without the spoken word. He respected her desire to sheer off anything that might be construed as establishing a new relationship between them, and she appreciated his restraint to the full. They discussed foreign lands and peoples until the road bent toward the river again and the ferry was reached – at a point quite half a mile below the hotel.

And there was no boat!

A wire rope drooped into the darkness of the opposite bank, but no voice answered Medenham’s hail. Cynthia said not a syllable until her companion handed her his watch with a request that she should hold it.

“You are not going into that river,” she cried determinedly.

“There is not the slightest risk,” he said.

“But there is. What if you were seized with cramp?”

“I shall cling to the rope, if that will satisfy you. I have swum the Zambesi before to-day, not from choice, I admit, and it is twenty times the width of the Wye, while it holds more crocodiles than the Wye holds salmon.”

“Well – if you promise about the rope.”

Soon he was out of sight, and her heart knew its first pang of fear. Then she heard his cry of “Got the boat,” followed by the clank of a sculling oar and the creak of the guiding-wheel on the hawser.

At last, shortly before midnight, they neared the hotel. Lights were visible on the quay, and Medenham read their meaning.

“They are sending out a search party,” he said. “I must go and stop them. You run on to the hotel, Miss Vanrenen. Good-night! I shall give you an extra hour to-morrow.”

She hesitated the fraction of a second. Then she extended a hand.

“Good-night,” she murmured. “After all, I have had a real lovely time.”

Then she was gone, and Medenham turned to thank the hotel servants and others who were going to the rescue.

“I wonder what the guv’nor will say when he sees Cynthia,” he thought, with the smile on his face of the lover who deems his lady peerless among her sex. He recalled that moment before many days had passed, and his reflections then took a new guise, for not all the knowledge and all the experience a man may gather can avail him a whit to forecast the future when Fate is spinning her complex web.

CHAPTER X
THE HIDDEN FOUNTS OF EVIL

It was a flushed and somewhat breathless Cynthia who ran into the quiet country hotel at an hour when the Licensing Laws of Britain have ordained that quiet country hotels shall be closed. But even the laws of the Medes and Persians, which altered not, must have bulged a little at times under the pressure of circumstances. The daughter of an American millionaire could not be reported as “missing” without a buzz of commotion being aroused in that secluded valley. As a matter of fact, no one in the house dreamed of going to bed until her disappearance was accounted for, one way or the other.

Mrs. Devar, now really woebegone, screamed shrilly at sight of her. The lady’s nerves were in a parlous condition – “on a raw edge” was her own phrase – and the relief of seeing her errant charge again was so great that the shriek merged into a sob.

“Oh, my dear, my dear!” she wept, “what a shock you have given me! I thought you were gone!”

“Not so bad as that,” was the contrite answer. Cynthia interpreted “gone” as meaning “dead,” and naturally read into the other woman’s anxiety her own knowledge of the disaster to the boat. “We had a bit of an upset – that is all – and the bread always flops to the floor buttered side down, doesn’t it? So we had to struggle ashore on the wrong bank. It couldn’t be helped – that is, the accident couldn’t – but I ought not to have been on the river at such a late hour. Do forgive me, dear Mrs. Devar!”

By this time the girl’s left arm was around her friend’s portly form; in her intense eagerness to assuage Mrs. Devar’s agitation she began to stroke her hair with the disengaged hand. A deeply sympathetic landlady, a number of servants, and most of the feminine guests in the hotel – all the men were down on the quay – had gathered to murmur their congratulations; but Mrs. Devar, dismayed by Cynthia’s action, which might have brought about a catastrophe, revived with phenomenal suddenness.

“My dear child,” she cried, extricating herself from the encircling arm, “do let me look at you! I want to make sure that you are not injured. The boat upset, you say. Why, your clothes must be wringing wet!”

Cynthia laughed. She had guessed why her chaperon wished to keep her literally at arm’s length. She spread her skirts with a quick gesture that relieved an awkward situation.

“Not a drop on my clothes,” she said gleefully. “The water just touched the soles of my boots, but before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’ Fitzroy had whisked me out of the skiff – and landed me on dry land.”

“You were in shallow water, then?” put in the smiling proprietress.

“Oh no, fairly deep. Fitzroy was up to his waist in the stream.”

“And the boat upset?” came the amazed chorus.

“I didn’t quite mean that. What actually happened was this. I discovered that the hour was rather late, and Fitzroy was rowing down stream at a great pace when some sunken thing, a tree-root he thinks, caught the side of the boat and started a plank. I was so taken by surprise that I should have sat right there and gone to the bottom with the boat, but Fitzroy jumped overboard straight away and hiked me out.”

Ready-tongued Cynthia was beginning to find detailed explanation rather difficult, and her speech reverted to the picturesque idioms of her native land. It was the happiest ruse she could have adopted. Everyone laughed at the notion of being “hiked out.” None of her hearers knew quite what it meant, yet it covered the requisite ground, which was more than might have been achieved by explicit English.

“Where did the accident take place?” asked the landlady.

Cynthia was vague on this point, but when she told how the return journey was made, the pretty Welsh waitress hit on a theory.

“In-deed to goot-ness, miss,” she cried, “you wass be-tween the Garren River an’ Huntsham Bridge. It iss a bad place, so it iss, however. Me an’ my young man wass shoaled there once, we wass.”

Cynthia felt that her face and neck had grown positively scarlet, and she could have kissed the well-disposed landlady for entering on a voluble disquisition as to the tricks played by the Wye on those unaware of its peculiarities, especially at night. A general conversation broke out, but Mrs. Devar, rapidly regaining her spirits after enduring long hours of the horrible obsession that Medenham had run off with her heiress, noted that telltale blush. At present her object was to assist rather than embarrass, so with a fine air of motherly solicitude she asked:

“Where did you leave Fitzroy?”

“He saw preparations being made to send boats in search of us, and he went to stop them. Oh, here he is!”

Medenham entered, and the impulsive Mrs. Devar ran to meet him. Though he had been in the river again only five minutes earlier, the walk up a dust-laden path had covered his sopping boots with mud, and in the not very powerful light of the hall, where a score or more of anxious people were collected, it was difficult to notice that his clothes were wet. But “Wiggy” Devar did not care now whether or not the story told by Cynthia was true. With reaction from the nightmare that had possessed her since ten o’clock came a sharp appreciation of the extraordinarily favorable turn taken by events so far as she was concerned. If a French count were to be supplanted by an English viscount, what better opportunity of approving the change could present itself?

“Mr. Fitzroy,” she said in her shrill voice, “I can never thank you sufficiently for the courage and resource you displayed in rescuing Miss Vanrenen. You have acted most nobly. I am only saying now what Mr. Vanrenen will say when his daughter and I tell him of your magnificent behavior.”

He reddened and tried to smile, though wishing most heartily that these heroics, if unavoidable, had been kept for some other time and place. He could not believe that Cynthia had exalted a not very serious incident into a “rescue,” yet she might be vexed if he cheapened his own services. In any event, it was doubtful whether she would wish her father to hear of the escapade until she told him herself at the close of the tour.

“I am sure Miss Vanrenen felt safe while in my care,” was all he dared to say, but Cynthia promptly understood his perplexity and came to his aid.

“Mrs. Devar thinks far more of our adventure than we do,” she broke in. “Our chief difficulty lay in finding the road. The only time I felt worried was when you crossed the river to retrieve the ferryboat. But surely I have caused enough excitement for to-night. You ought to take some hot lemonade and go to bed.”

A man who had walked up the hill from the boathouse with Medenham laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Come along, old chap!” he cried. “You certainly want a hot draught of some sort, and you must not hang about in those wet clothes.”

“Yes,” purred Mrs. Devar, “don’t run the risk of catching cold, Fitzroy. It would spoil everything if you were laid up.”

Her gracious manner almost deceived Medenham. During his years of wandering he had come across unexpected good qualities in men from whom he looked for naught but evil – was it the same with women? He hoped so. Perhaps this scheming marriage-broker had shed her worldly scales under the stress of emotion.

“You need have no fear that the car will not be waiting for you in the morning, Mrs. Devar,” he said, smiling frankly into her steel-gray eyes. “Did you say half-past nine, Miss Vanrenen?” he asked, turning to snatch one last look at Cynthia.

“Yes. Good-night – and thank you.”

She offered her hand to him before them all. The touch of her cool fingers was infinitely sweet, but when he strove to surprise some hint of her thought in those twin pools of limpid light that were wont to gaze at him so fearlessly he failed, for all the daring had fled from Cynthia, and he knew – how Heaven and lovers alone can tell – that her heart was beating with a fright she had not felt when he staggered under the relentless pressure of the river while holding her in his arms.

To the lookers-on the girl’s outstretched hand was a token of gratitude; to Medenham it carried an acknowledgment of that equality which should reign between those who love. His head swam in a sudden vertigo of delight, and he hurried away without uttering a word. There were some, perhaps, who wondered; others who saw in his brusqueness nothing more than the confusion of an inferior overwhelmed by the kindly condescension of a young and charming mistress; but the one who did fully and truly interpret the secret springs of his action went suddenly white to the lips, and her voice was curiously low and strained as she turned to Mrs. Devar.

“Come, dear,” she murmured, “I am tired, it would seem; and you, you must be quite worn out with anxiety.”

“My darling child,” gushed Mrs. Devar, “I should have been nearly dead if I had not known that Fitzroy was with you, but he is one of those men who inspire confidence. I refused to admit even to myself that anything of evil consequence could happen to you while he was present. How fortunate we were that day in town – ”

The man who had suggested that the hotel pharmacist could dispense hot drinks other than lemonade nudged an acquaintance.

“Our chauffeur friend has a rippin’ nice job,” he whispered. “Wouldn’t mind taking his billet myself – it ’ud be a change from everlastin’ goff. Hello! Where is he? I meant to – ”

Medenham had gone, striding away up the hillside in a very frenzy of happiness. Four days, and Cynthia as good as won! Was it possible, then, that the disguised prince of the fairytale could be a reality – that such romances might still be found in this gray old world? Four days! He could not be deeper in love with Cynthia had he known her four years, or forty, and he was certain now that he had really loved her before he had been in her company four minutes.

But these rhapsodies were cut short by his arrival at the hotel garage, with the displeasing discovery that no one named Dale had reached Symon’s Yat that evening, while the stolid fact stared him in the face that his cherished Mercury demanded several hours of hard-working attentions if it were to glisten and hum in its usual perfection next morning.

“Queer thing,” he said, thinking aloud rather than addressing the stableman who had given this disconcerting news. “I have never before known him fail; and I wired to Hereford early enough.”

“Oh, he’s in Hereford, is he?” inquired the man.

“He ought not to be, but he is, I fear.”

“Then it’ll be him who axed for ye on the telephone?”

“When?”

“It ’ud be somewheres about a quarter or half past eight. Lizzie tole me after the old leddy kem up to see if you’d taken the car out.”

Medenham’s wits were alert enough now.

“I don’t fully understand,” he said. “What old lady, and why did she come?”

“That’s wot bothered me,” was the reply. “Everybody knew that the young leddy an’ you were on the Wye: ’deed to goodness, some of us thought you were in it. Anyways, it was long after ten when she – ”

“You mean Mrs. Devar, I suppose – the older lady of the two who arrived in my car?”

“Yes, that’s her. She wanted to be sure the car wasn’t gone, and nothing would suit her but the key must be brought from the orfis an’ the coach-house door unlocked so’s she could see it with her own eyes. Well, Lizzie sez to me, ‘That’s funny, it is, because she watched they two goin’ on the river, and was in the box a long time telephonin’ to a shuffer called Dale, at Hereford.’ Thinks I, ‘It’s funnier that the shuffer who’s here should be expectin’ a chap named Dale,’ but I said nothink. I never does to wimmen. Lord luv yer, they’ll twist a tale twenty ways for Sundays to suit their own pupposes afterwards.”

Lightning struck from a cloudless sky a second time that night at Symon’s Yat, and in its gleam was revealed the duplicity of Mrs. Devar. Medenham could not guess the double significance of Dale’s message and failure to appear, but he was under no delusion now as to the cause of those honeyed words. Dale had been indiscreet, had probably blurted out his employer’s title, and Mrs. Devar knew at last who the chauffeur was whose interference had baffled her plans.

He laughed bitterly, but did not pursue the inquiry any further.

“Can you clean coachwork and brass?” he asked, stooping to unlock the toolbox.

The stableman shuffled uneasily from one foot to the other. The hour was past midnight, and the alarm raised at the hotel had already robbed him of two hours’ sleep.

“Hosses is more in my line,” he answered gruffly.

“But if I give you half a sovereign perhaps you will not mind helping me. I shall attend to the engine myself.”

“’Arf a suv-rin did you say, mister?” came the panting question.

“Yes. Be quick! Off with your coat, and get busy. A man who can groom a horse properly ought to be able to use a rubber and hose.”

By two o’clock the Mercury was shining above and below. Thoroughly weary, yet well satisfied with the day’s record, Medenham went to bed. He was up at seven, and meant to talk severely to Dale after breakfast; then he found, by consulting a directory, that the small hotel where his man had arranged to stay did not possess a telephone. It was annoying, but he had the consolation of knowing that an hour’s slow run would bring him to Hereford and reunite him with his sorely-needed baggage. He was giving a few finishing touches to the car’s toilette, when the Welsh waiting-maid hurried to the garage; Miss Vanrenen wanted him at once.

She awaited him in the veranda of the hotel, which fronted the southeast. A shower of June roses, pink and crimson and white, bespangled the sloping roof and hid the square posts that supported it, and a flood of vivid sunshine irradiated Cynthia as she leaned over the low rail of the balcony and smiled a greeting. She presented a picture that was a triumph of unconscious art, and her beauty affected Medenham more than a deep draught of the strongest wine ever vinted by man. Yesterday she was a charming girl, radiantly good-looking, and likely to attract attention even in circles where pretty women were plentiful as blackberries in a September thicket, but to-day, in Medenham’s eyes, she was a woodland sprite, an ethereal creature cast in no mortal mold. So enthralled was he by the vision that he failed to note her attire. She wore the muslin dress of the previous night, and this, in itself, might have prepared him for what was to come.

“Good-morning, Mr. Fitzroy,” she said, with a fine attempt at re-establishing those friendly relations which might reasonably exist between the owner of a motor-car and its hirer, “how are you after your strenuous labors of yesterday? I have heard all about you. Fancy remaining out of bed till two o’clock! Couldn’t that precious car of yours be cleaned this morning, and by someone else?”

He found his tongue at that.

“Mercury obeys none but Jupiter,” he said.

Her eyes met his fairly, and she laughed.

“That is the first conceited thing I have heard you say,” she cried, “and, by Jove, aren’t you flying high?”

“Jupiter assumed disguises,” he reminded her. “Once, when he peered into an Olympian grove, he saw Io, and took the form of a youth so that he might talk with her. He found her so lovable that he passed many a pleasant hour in her company wandering on the banks of the classic stream that flowed through the wood, and in those hours he was not Jupiter but a boy, a boy very much in love. Every man has, or ought to have, something of Jupiter, a good deal of the boy, in his make-up.”

He turned and looked at the Wye and its tree-shaded banks. Then he faced Cynthia again, and his hands rested on the barrier that divided them. For one mad instant he thought of vaulting it, and Cynthia read his thought; she drew back in a panic. A less infatuated wooer than Medenham might have noted that she seemed to fear interruption more than any too impulsive action on his part.

“I sent for you to tell you that Mrs. Devar is ill,” she said in a flurry of words. “I am afraid she suffered more from the fright than I imagined last night. Anyhow, she has asked me to let her remain here to-day. You won’t mind, I am sure, though it must be a bother not to have your luggage. Can’t you run in to Hereford and get it? I am quite content to rest in this pretty place and write letters.”

“I do honestly believe that Mrs. Devar is more frightened than ill,” he said.

“Oh, she isn’t making a fuss about it. Indeed, she was willing to go to Hereford this afternoon if I particularly wanted to attend service at the cathedral. I did, as a matter of fact, but it would be real mean to insist on it after scaring the poor thing into a nervous headache.”

“The affair arranges itself admirably,” he said. “At most cathedrals there is an anthem, followed by a sermon by some eminent preacher, about three o’clock. Write your letters this morning, or, better still, climb to the top of the Yat and see the glorious view from the top. Come back for lunch at one, and – ”

“I’ll see what Mrs. Devar thinks of it,” broke in Cynthia, whose cheeks were borrowing tints from the red roses and the white with astonishing fluctuations of color. She ran off, more like Io, the sylph, than ever, and Medenham stood there in a brown study.

“This sort of thing can’t go on,” he argued with himself. “At any minute now I shall be taking her in my arms and kissing her, and that will not be fair to Cynthia, who is proud and queenly, and who will strive against the dictates of her own heart because it is not seemly that she should wed her father’s paid servant. So I must tell her, to-day – perhaps during the run home from Hereford, perhaps to-night. But, dash it all! that will break up our tour. One ought to consider the world we live in; Cynthia will be one of its leaders, and it will never do to have people saying that Viscount Medenham became engaged to Cynthia Vanrenen while acting as the lady’s chauffeur during a thousand-mile run through the West of England and Wales. Now, what am I to do?”

The answer came from a bedroom window that overlooked the veranda.

“Mr. Fitzroy!”

He knew as he looked up that Cynthia dared not face him again, for her voice was too exquisitely subtle in its modulations not to betray its owner’s disappointment before she uttered another word.

“I am very sorry,” she said rapidly, “but I feel I ought not to leave Mrs. Devar until she is better, so I mean to remain indoors all day. I shall not require the car before nine o’clock to-morrow. If you like to visit Hereford, go at any time that suits your convenience.”

She seemed to regret the curtness of her speech, though indeed she was raging inwardly because of certain barbed shafts planted in her breast by Mrs. Devar’s faint protests, and tried to mitigate the blow she had inflicted by adding, with a valiant smile:

“For this occasion only, Jupiter must content himself with Mercury as a companion.”

“If I had Jove’s power – ” he began wrathfully.

“If you were Cynthia Vanrenen, you would do exactly what she is doing,” she cried, and fled from the window.

It is not to be denied that he extracted some cold comfort from that last cryptic remark. Cynthia wanted to come, but Mrs. Devar had evidently burked the excursion. Why? Because Cynthia’s escort would be Viscount Medenham and not Arthur Simmonds, orthodox and highly respectable chauffeur. But Mrs. Devar plainly declared herself on the side of Viscount Medenham last night. Why, then, did she stop a short journey by motor, with the laudable objective of hearing an anthem and a sermon in a cathedral, when overnight she permitted the far less defensible trip on the river with the hated Fitzroy? It needed no great penetration to solve this puzzle. Mrs. Devar was afraid of some development that might happen if the girl visited Hereford that day. She counted on Medenham being chained to Symon’s Yat while Cynthia was there – consequently she had heard something from Dale that rendered it eminently necessary that neither he nor Cynthia should be seen in Hereford on the Sunday. Probably, too, she did not anticipate that Cynthia would don the haircloth of self-discipline and avoid him during the whole of the day, since that was what the girl meant by her allusion to Monday’s starting-time.

Perhaps, using a woman’s privilege, she might change her mind towards sunset; meanwhile, it behooved him to visit Hereford and pry into things there.

Nevertheless, he was a wise lover. Cynthia might dismiss him graciously to follow his own behests, but it might not please her if she discovered that he had taken her permission too literally. He entered the hotel and wrote a letter:

“My dear Miss Vanrenen – ” no pretense of “Madam” or other social formula, but a plain and large “My dear,” with the name appended as a concession to the humbug of life, even in regard to the woman he loved – “I am going to Hereford, but shall return here for luncheon. Mrs. Devar’s illness is not likely to be lasting, and the view from the Yat is, if possible, better in the afternoon than in the morning. In addition to my obvious need of a clean collar, I believe that our presence in Hereford to-day is not desired. Why? I shall make it my business to find out. Yours ever sincerely – ”

Then he reached a high and stout stone wall of difficulty. Was he to fall back on the subterfuge of “George Augustus Fitzroy,” which, of course, was his proper signature in law? He disliked this veil of concealment more and more each instant, but it was manifestly out of the question that he should sign himself “Medenham,” or “George,” while he had fought several pitched battles at Harrow with classmates who pined to label him “Augustus,” abbreviated. So, greatly daring, he wrote: “Mercury’s Guv’nor,” trusting to luck whether or not Cynthia’s classical lore would remind her that Mercury was the son of Jupiter.

He reread this effusion twice, and was satisfied with it as the herald of others. “My dear” sounded well; the intimacy of “our presence” was not overdone; while “yours ever sincerely” was excellent. He wondered if Cynthia would analyze it word for word in that fashion. Well, some day he might ask her. For the present he sealed the letter with a sigh and gave it to a waiter for safe delivery; he fancied, but could not be quite sure, that a good deal of unnecessary play with the motor’s Gabriel horn five minutes later brought a slender muslined figure to a window of the then distant hotel.

From Symon’s Yat to Hereford is about fifteen miles, and Medenham drew out of the narrow lane leading from the river to Whitchurch about a quarter-past nine. Thenceforth a straight and good road lay clear before him, and he meant to break the law as to speed limit by traveling at the fastest rate compatible with his own safety and that of other road-users. It was no disgrace to the Mercury car, therefore, when a dull report and a sudden effort of the steering-wheel to swerve to the right betokened the collapse of an inner tube on the off side. From the motorist’s point of view it was difficult to understand the cause of the mishap. The whole four tires were new so recently as the previous Monday, and Medenham was far too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to grasp the essential fact that Fate was still taking an intelligent interest in him.

Of course, he did not hurry over the work as though his life depended on it. Even when the cover was replaced and the tire pumped to the proper degree of air-pressure he lit a cigarette and had a look at the magneto before restarting the engine. Two small boys had appeared from space, and he amused himself by asking them to reckon how long it would take two men to mow a field of grass which one of the men could mow in three days and the other in four. He promised a reward of sixpence if the correct answer were forthcoming in a minute, and raised it to a shilling during the next minute. This stimulated their wits to suggest “a day and three-quarters” instead of the first frantic effort of “three days and a half.”