“No. That’s it! I remember now seeing the man take the drum inside by mistake. He must have dropped it on the way back.” “Don’t you think it would have been more sensible to look before you leaped—especially such a long leap! And what a pace you must have come in this heat!” He flushed faintly. “I’m a good walker. I know the cuts.” “Well, if you get back as quick as you came, there won’t be much time lost.” She clucked up Methusalem. “Good afternoon—hope you’ll find your stick, and that you’ll drum-in a good house.” What! She too thought him capable of being a drum-banger, a minion of marionettes. Had women then no eye—no perception of clothes—as well as no humour? The mob was melting away under their amiable parley, but he now rallied it afresh: “Stop!” he called desperately after Jinny. “Stop!” But Nip’s joyous bark at the resumption of the journey drowned all lesser remarks, and again the cart receded on the horizon—an horizon he knew houseless and arid, no region for a lonely, good-looking girl. Let poor pockmarked Polly Flippance brave the wild, if female carriers there must be: not his Jinny. No, he must reveal himself at the next stop, he must remonstrate, protest. But the trouble was that the thing would not stop, and that there would be no stop now—he knew—for several miles. Perspiring, panting, hallooing and waving his stick and utterly oblivious of the scandalized street, he pursued at his swiftest, and Methusalem being no serious competitor in the long run, Jinny heard him at last, and looking back through the tilt over the dwindled packages, saw the pitiful, gesturing figure, and to his infinite relief the cart drew up. “What have you lost now?” she called. “Your sandwich-boards?” “I’m not going back to Miss Flippance,” he panted, “I’m going Bradmarsh way.” “Then why ever didn’t you say so?” she replied calmly. “Jump up!” Jump up? She asked a strange young man to jump up? Then what else could she have done if he had said who he was—a fact of which he had indeed been just about to make royal proclamation. “You take passengers?” he gasped. He remembered now that Joey had told him the cart would take him, but then he had had no idea that “her” was not the vehicle. She was equally surprised: “Why else did you run after me?” Run after her? He did not like the phrase. Girls ran after men—girls of a sort—to some extent girls of every sort: that was the doctrine in _his_ set. And yet he _had_ run after her—it called for explanation. “I wasn’t running after you,” he said slowly, “it was only that—that I couldn’t believe my eyes to see you like that.” “Like what?” She was frankly puzzled. “Driving about alone in this God-forsaken part. It’s—” scandalous, he was about to say, but before the glimmering fire in her eyes he altered the word—“it’s dangerous.” “Dangerous!” Her little laugh rippled out. “I thought you said you knew these parts.”