'Oh yes, sister,' Mrs. Knight replied hastily. 'You had better take it.' Aunt Annie rang the bell with quick decision. 'Sarah,' she said, 'run out and get me a cab, a four-wheeler. You understand, a four-wheeler.' 'Yes'm. Shall I put my jacket on, mum?' Sarah asked, glancing through the window. 'No. Go instantly!' 'Yes'm.' 'I wonder what he wants it for,' Aunt Annie remarked, after she had found the manuscript and put it under her arm. 'Perhaps he has mentioned it to Sir George, and Sir George is going to do something.' 'I thought he had forgotten all about it,' said Mrs. Knight. 'But he never gives a thing up, Henry doesn't.' Sarah drove dashingly up to the door in a hansom. 'Take that back again,' commanded Aunt Annie, cautiously putting her nose outside the front-door. It was a snowy and sleety April morning, and she had already had experience of its rigour. 'I said a four-wheeler.' 'Please'm, there wasn't one,' Sarah defended herself. 'None on the stand, lady,' said the cabman brightly. 'You'll never get a four-wheeler on a day like this.' Aunt Annie raised her veil and looked at her sister. Like many strong-minded and vigorous women, she had a dislike of hansoms which amounted to dread. She feared a hansom as though it had been a revolver--something that might go off unexpectedly at any moment and destroy her. 'I daren't go in that,' she admitted frankly. She was torn between her allegiance to the darling Henry and her fear of the terrible machine. 'Suppose I go with you?' Mrs. Knight suggested. 'Very well,' said Aunt Annie, clenching her teeth for the sacrifice. Sarah flew for Mrs. Knight's bonnet, fur mantle, gloves, and muff; and with remarkably little delay the sisters and the manuscript started. First they had the window down because of the snow and the sleet; then they had it up because of the impure air; and lastly Aunt Annie wedged a corner of the manuscript between the door and the window, leaving a slit of an inch or so for ventilation. The main body of the manuscript she supported by means of her muff. Alas! her morbid fear of hansoms was about to be justified--at any rate, justified in her own eyes. As the machine was passing along Walham Green, it began to overtake a huge market-cart laden, fraught, and piled up with an immense cargo of spring onions from Isleworth; and just as the head of the horse of the hansom drew level with the tail of the market-cart, the off hind wheel of the cart succumbed, and a ton or more of spring onions wavered and slanted in the snowy air. The driver of the hansom did his best, but he could not prevent his horse from premature burial amid spring onions. The animal nobly resisted several hundredweight of them, and then tottered and fell and was lost to view under spring onions. The ladies screamed in concert, and discovered themselves miraculously in the roadway, unhurt, but white and breathless. A constable and a knife-grinder picked them up.