With infinite deliberation the elephants and the motor-car arrived at the top of the cart-track. The three elephants not engaged in hauling appeared to have formed a prejudice against the motor-car; the fourth, the worker, who had been used to dragging logs of teak in India, accepted his rôle with indifference. He pulled nonchalantly, as if he was pulling a child’s go-cart, thus, happily, leaving the keeper free to control the other beasts. At length the cortège--it had all the solemnity of a funeral pageant--passed safely into the field and out of Richard’s sight towards the highroad. He heard the spit, spit of the petrol-engine of the motor-car, now able to move of itself on the easy gradient, and simultaneously a startling snort and roar from one of the elephants. It occurred to him to hope that the leviathan had not taken it into his gigantic head to wreck the machine. The notion was amusing, and he laughed when he thought how frail a thing a motor-car would prove before the attack of an elephant’s trunk. Then he proceeded duly towards the road, hugging the hedge. Once more he heard the snort and the roar, and then a stern cry of command from the keeper, a little scream from the girl, and an angry squeak from the elephant. The spit, spit of the motor-car at the same moment ceased. When, after some minutes of scouting, he reached the gate and had a view of the road, he rather expected to see the motor-car lying in fragments in Watling Street, with, possibly, a couple of mangled corpses in the near neighbourhood, and a self-satisfied elephant dominating the picture. But his horrid premonitions were falsified.. The keeper had clearly proved the superiority of man over the brute creation; he was astride the neck of the obstreperous elephant, and the herd were trampling, with their soft, flabby footfalls, down Watling Street, along the sloping embankment, into the deep, broad valley which separates Dunstable from the belt of villages to the north of it. The lady with the motor-car stood quiescent in the road. She had got safely out of her chalk-pit, and was now waiting for the elephants to disappear before proceeding on her journey. Richard hesitated whether to return and examine the chalk-pit or to keep in touch with the lady. What any creature--especially a woman, and a young woman--could be doing with a motor-car in a chalk-pit in the middle of the night passed his wit to conceive. Nor could he imagine how any sane driver of a motor-car could take his car down such a steep slope as that cart-track with the least hope of getting it up again without the assistance of an elephant, or at least a team of horses. She must surely have been urged by the very strongest reasons to descend into the pit. What were those reasons? He wanted badly to examine the chalk-pit at once, but he decided ultimately that it would be better to watch the lady--‘Craig’s girl.’ The chalk-pit would always remain where it was, whereas the lady, undoubtedly an