With Amos the little girls and Prince started back along the dusty but pleasant road to the Corners. It was nearly two years since Carolyn May had first walked this way to the carpenter shop to play in Mr. Parlow's shavings. Everything along the road seemed just the same as in that long past time. Perhaps it was the very same squirrel Prince had then chased that he set out after now, full yelp, and scattering his ornaments of shavings to the four winds. "I don't know how it is," his little mistress observed, "but Prince never _will_ learn that he can't climb trees and lamp-posts. If a cat runs up a post he thinks he can get her by jumping. And see him now, trying to climb that tree after that squirrel! I'm ashamed of you, Princey Cameron. You act just as if you didn't have good sense." Behind them sounded the harsh roar of a heavy touring car. Automobiles were not plentiful in the roads about Sunrise Cove and the Corners. The condition of the highways themselves were the cause of that. Where much timber-hauling is done the roads are always deeply rutted and otherwise badly cut up. So Carolyn, with the less sophisticated country children, stood aside to watch the big car pass. To their surprise it slowed down and was finally halted by the driver right beside them. The driver was a liveried chauffeur. Carolyn stared at him with growing wonder in her eyes. The only passenger sat beside the driver, and he it was who first spoke: "Are you sure you do not know this road, Ren?" "I'm all up in the air, Boss, like I tol' you," the chauffeur said, clipping his words as a French Canadian often does. "And these roads! They will rattle the fine car of M'sieu to little bits." "We won't do that," drawled the other. "The Old Man would say something, sure enough. Here, children! How far is it to a service station?" Amos was dumb. Freda looked at Carolyn for advice upon this weighty point. Freda had never heard of an automobile service station. Carolyn May tore her gaze away from the liveried chauffeur and looked at the man who had asked the question, only to be stricken with further amazement. The driver of the car called René she had recognized as the chauffeur of those "awfully rich people" who had smashed the pale lady's go-cart! And the dark-faced, unpleasant looking man beside him on the front seat, Carolyn identified too. She had seen him the day on which the pale lady had fainted. The man had come out of one of the apartments under that of the Lairds, and had turned his keen gaze upon the little girl in what Carolyn had thought at the time a threatening way. He did not recognize the little girl now. He merely repeated his question more sharply. "These backwoods kids," he said, _sotto voce_, to René, "are all dumb." Carolyn heard this and she did not like it at all. Indeed, she did not like the dark man, with his very black brows and saturnine expression of countenance. But she said politely: