It did Pauline so much good as that she was able to obtain many looks at the profile she admired, for she saw it clean-cut against the passing landscape for the sixty miles of daylight out of the seventy-five miles home, while she sat beside its owner and tried many times to draw him into talk. His taciturnity on this particular day was a thing beyond any experience with it she had yet had. She had heard Burns talk, and talk well, on many different subjects, the while he sat upon the Chesters' porch of a summer evening, the three of them about him, and he had seemed to enjoy talking. He certainly could not be wholly occupied with the machine, for at no time did he let the engine out for what it could do, but contented himself with a steady, moderate pace very different from the sort of furious speed in which he and the Green Imp were accustomed to indulge when occasion offered. Altogether he presented to the girl a problem which she could not solve and was never further from solving than during the seventy-five miles she sat beside him on the run home. “You're all to come in and have an ice-cool, salad-y supper with us,” Mrs. Macauley declared as the car turned in at the home driveway. “Hot coffee, too, if you want it--or even beefsteak if you prefer. But I thought since it was so hot--” “I'll take the beefsteak,” announced Burns over his shoulder, “if I find nothing urgent for, me to do. If there's a call--” “If there is, make it, and you shall have the beefsteak when you get back,” Martha promised him. Mrs. Macauley was of the sort of young married woman who delights to make her friends comfortable--and none better than Red Pepper, who was her husband's most valued friend, as he was that of his neighbour on the other side, Arthur Chester. To everybody's regret the call was waiting, and as the party went in to supper they waved their hands at the Green Imp flying away down the road. It was not till long after the “ice-cool, salad-y supper” was ended and the women, freshly clad, were sitting on the porch again, the men smoking on the steps below them, that tine Green Imp came back. Ten minutes later a large figure crossed the lawn at a pace which suggested both reluctance and fatigue. “If it hadn't been for that beefsteak--” Burns began. “You wouldn't have come,” finished Macauley. “Oh, we know that! Go in and get it, Red, and perhaps afterward the charms of human society will have their inning.”