The driver in our brains is an intolerable fellow in sudden crisis. He loses his head; distracted he pulls the levers, and, behold, in a moment the thing is irrevocably done; we are a coward legging it down the street, a murderer with bloody hand, a liar with false words suddenly pumped. A moment later the driver is calm and aghast at the ruin he has contrived. Why, before God, did he pull the leg lever?--the arm lever?--the tongue lever? In an instant's action he has accomplished calamity; where sunshine laughed now darkness heaps; where the prospect smiled disaster now comes rolling up in thunder. These are your crises. Again, as now with George, the driver becomes temporarily idiot--stands us oafishly silent, or perhaps jerks out some stupid words; remembers when too late the quip that would have fetched the laugh, the thrust that would have sped the wound. He is an intolerable fellow. “Oh, what must you think of me?” That pause followed while the driver in George's brain stood gapingly inactive; and then came laughter to him like a draught of champagne. For the girl put up her firm, round chin and laughed with a clear pipe of glee--a laugh to call a laugh as surely as a lark's note will set a hedge in song; and it called the laugh in George. He said: “I am thinking the nicest things of you. But have you dropped from the skies?” “From a _cab_,” she protested. She turned to the road; back to George in dismay, for the catapult, its bullet shot, had bolted up the street--was gone from view. “Oh!--I _was_ in a cab?” she implored. George said: “It _looked_ like a cab. But a fairy-car, I think.” A pucker of her brows darkened the quick mirth that came to her eyes. She cried: “Oh, don't joke. She will be killed.” “You were not alone?” “No--oh, no! What has happened to her?” “We had better follow.” She corrected his number. “Yes, I had better. Thank you so much for your help.” She took a step; faltered upon it with a little exclamation of pain; put a white tooth on her lip. “You have hurt your foot?” George said. “My ankle, I think. Oh dear!” and then again she laughed. It came even then to George that certainly she would have made her fortune were she to set up a gloom-exorcising bureau--waiting at the end of a telephone wire ready to rush with that laugh to banish the imps of melancholy. Never had he heard so infectious a note of mirth. “Oh, what must you think of me?” she ended. “I simply cannot help laughing, you know--and yet, oh dear!” She put the tips of the fingers of a hand against her lower lip, gazed very anxiously up the road, and then again she gave that clear pipe of laughter. “I can't help it,” she told him imploringly. “I simply cannot help laughing. It is funny, you know. She was scolding me--” “_Scolding_!” George exclaimed. That beauty should be scolded!