We went after them; we gave them the horn and overtook and passed them on a stiff grade, amid cheers from both cars. But all of our cheering was done by Todd. "Now they are following us," said he. "Do you feel better, my dear?" "Better!" she lamented. "How can I ever look them in the face again?" "Turn around," he suggested, "and direct your gaze through the little window in the back curtain." She bade him stop at the next corner. She would walk home. She was humiliated. Never had she felt so ashamed. "Isn't that an odd way to feel when we have beaten the shoes off them?" "But they will think we tried to." "So we did," he chuckled; "and we walked right past them, in high, while Burton was fussing with his gear shift. Give our little engine a fair go at a hill, my dear----" "I am not in the least interested in engines, sir. I am only mortified beyond words." She had words a-plenty, however. "Isn't it bad enough for you to drive your little rattletrap to college and get into the paper about it? No; you have to show it off in a fashionable avenue, and run races with the best people in Ashland, and scream at them like a freshman, and make an exhibition of me!" His attention was absorbed in hopping out from under a truck coming in from a side street. A foolish driver would have slowed and crashed. I was proud of Todd. But his lady was not. "You have no right to go like this. You don't know enough. You will break something." He had already broken the speed law. Unknown to him, a motor-cycle cop was tagging close behind us on our blind side. "If you think this is going, my dear," said Todd reassuringly, "wait till we strike the turnpike. Then I'll show you what little Hilaritas can really do." "Stop at the car barns," she commanded. We crossed the car-barn tracks at a gallop. The cop rode abreast of us now. "Cut it out, Bill," he warned. "You see?" she crowed. "You will wind up in jail and give the papers another scandal. Why didn't you stop at the car barns?" "Because we are going to Mountaindale," he explained cheerily; "where the nice people drive. Perhaps we shall see the John Quincy Burtons again--as we come back." "If we ever do come back!" "Or how would you like to have supper with them up there?" She had gone into one of her silences. Ill We settled down for the long pull over First Mountain. Todd slowed my spark and gave me my head. Then he addressed the partner of his joy-ride in a new voice: "Amanda, my dear, you and I need to have a frank little understanding." She agreed. "For some years past," he began, "I have borne without complaint, even without resentment, a certain attitude that you have seen fit to adopt toward me. I have borne it patiently because I felt that to an extent I deserved it." My floor boards creaked as she gathered her forces for the counter attack. He went on recklessly: