“You need not resort to the weather as an excuse,” she said, “I don’t want to go at all.” David stared, and a slow color burned under his tanned skin. Then he looked half-amused. “Caro must have been having some kind of an extra tilt with Cousin Jason, Mammy Lil,” he said, “and she thinks I’m an old jay, too, and keeps ruffling her feathers at me.—I was about to say that the sun would be out inside of an hour, and by five o’clock the roads will be in the pink of condition. I’ll show you what Peggy can really do in the way of speed.” “I told you I don’t want to go,” said Caro, angrily. “I beg pardon,” said David easily; “you told me you would go. I couldn’t possibly be mistaken.” I was looking at Caro in open-eyed amazement. She had never spoken to David that way in her life—nor to any one since she had ceased to be a child. She caught my look, and colored deeply. Then she cuddled her face against mine so that neither David nor I could see it. “Dear Mammy Lil, don’t look as if you didn’t know me,” she said, with a sudden little catch in her voice; “I’ve always told you I’m hateful, and you won’t believe it; when I convince you, don’t quit loving me.” “You silly child,” I answered, patting the red-brown coil of curls; “I’ll never quit loving you, whether I’m dead or alive. But I was afraid you weren’t well.” She laughed and pecked my cheek. “I’m well as ever was.—Have Peggy ready, David: I’d like to go sixty miles an hour.—Oh, dear, I’m losing all my hairpins!” She wasn’t at all. But she caught her hair with both hands, and vanished through one of the long windows. David looked after her with the set look which I had learned to know when he was little more than a baby. Then he, too, kissed me, and walked away, after putting the stand with my bell and a plate of biscuits on it close beside me. I lay there puzzled and troubled. The rain stopped presently, and I crumbled the biscuits and flung them out on the grass, watching the birds idly. Promptly at five David drove round with Peggy, his favorite mare, her beautiful head held as high as Caro’s own, and as free from torments of check-rein and blinders. She shone like satin, and stepped with a proud consciousness of her own worth and her master’s confidence in her. David sat chatting with me during the ten minutes Caro kept him waiting. She had on the pale green lawn when she came out, and a most fetching hat which she had herself concocted to go with it. I beheld her adornment with dismay. The lawn was more lace than lawn, and I knew she had planned it for what she called a “partyfied” dress. She usually went driving with David bareheaded, and in whatever garments she happened to have on. Her finery boded him no good; and I realized with a sinking heart that if I had had the wit to keep my astonishment out of my face she would have stuck to her first refusal, and the drive would have been postponed to a more auspicious day. David was riding to disaster—and I had opened the way.