corrected—with a second lurch—by its pilot. The effect was not tranquilizing; the shock swept the last confusion from Ffrench's brain.

"Where are you taking me?" he presently asked.

"Where do you want to go? I will set you down at the next village we come to; you can stay there to-night or you can get a trolley to the city."

The question remained unanswered. Several times Ffrench glanced, rather diffidently, at his companion's clear, firm profile, and looked away again without speaking.

"I went out to get my cousin to-day, and my host gave me a couple of highballs," he volunteered, at last. "I don't know what you thought—"

Lestrange twisted his car around a belated farm-wagon.

"How old are you?" he inquired calmly.

"Twenty-three."

"I'm nearly twenty-seven. That's what I thought."

The simpler mind considered this for a space.

"Some men are born awake, some awake themselves, and some are shaken into awakening," paraphrased Lestrange, in addition. "If I were you, I'd wake up; it comes easier and it's sure to arrive anyhow. There is the village ahead—shall I stop?"

"It looks terribly dull," was the doleful verdict.

"Then come with me," flashed the other unexpectedly; for a fractional instant his eyes left the road and turned to his companion's face. "Did you ever see race practice at dawn? Come try a night in a training camp."

"You'd bother with me?"

"Yes."

A head bobbed up by Ffrench's knee, where Rupert was clinging in some inexplicable fashion.

"Once I rode eight miles out there by the hood, head downward, holding in a pin," he imparted, by way of entertainment.

Ffrench stared at the reeling perch indicated, and gasped.

"What for?" he asked.

"So we could keep on to our control instead of being put out of the running, of course. Did you guess I was curing a headache?"

"But you might have been killed!" exclaimed Ffrench.

Even by the semi-light of the lamps there was visible the mechanician's droll twist of lip and brow.

"I'd drive to hell with Lestrange," he explained sweetly, and settled back in his place.

Ffrench drew a long breath. After a moment he again looked at the driver.

"I'll come," he accepted. "And, thank you."

It was Lestrange who smiled this time, with a sudden and enchanting warmth of mirth.

"We'll try to amuse you," he promised.

II

t was a business consultation that was being held in Mr. Ffrench's firelit library, in spite of the presence of a tea-table and the young girl behind it. A consultation between the two partners who composed the Mercury Automobile Company, of whom the lesser was speaking with a certain anecdotal weight.

"And he said he was losing too much time on the turns; so the next round he took the bend at seventy-two miles an hour. He went over, of course. The third car we've lost this year; I'm glad the season's closed."

Emily Ffrench gave an exclamation, her velvet eyes widening behind their black lashes.

"But the driver! Was the poor driver hurt, Mr. Bailey?"

"He wasn't killed, Miss Emily," answered Bailey, with a tinge of pensive regret. He was a large, ruddy, white-haired man, with the slow and careful habit of speech sometimes found in those who live much with massive machinery. "No, he wasn't killed; he's in the hospital. But he wrecked as good a car as ever was built, through sheer foolishness. It costs money."