He threw the suit-case in the bottom of the tonneau. The bag he stowed carefully under the cushions of the rear seat. The moment he placed his hand on the wheel of the machine, he was at his best. Every trace of the street gamin fell from him. Again he was the eagle-eyed master of time and space. The machine answered his touch with more than human obedience. He knew how to humor its mood. He conserved its power for a hill with unerring accuracy and threw it over the grades with rarely a pause to change his speeds. He could turn the sharp curves with such swift, easy grace that he scarcely caused Mary's body to swerve an inch. He could sense a rough place in the road and glide over it with velvet touch. A tire blew out, five miles up the stream from Asheville, and the easy, business-like deliberation with which he removed the old and adjusted the new, was a revelation to Mary of a new phase of his character. He never once grunted, or swore, or lost his poise, or manifested the slightest impatience. He set about his task coolly, carefully, skillfully, and finished it quickly and silently. His long silences at last began to worry her. An invisible barrier had reared itself between them. The impression was purely mental--but it was none the less real and distressing. There was a look of aloof absorption about him she had never seen before. At first she attributed it to the dread of meeting his kinsfolk for the first time, his fear of what they might be like or what they might think of him. He answered her questions cheerfully but mechanically. Sometimes he stared at her in a cold, impersonal way and gave no answer, as if her questions were an impertinence and she were not of sufficient importance to waste his breath on. Unable at last to endure the strain, she burst out impatiently: “What on earth's the matter with you, Jim?” “Why?” he asked softly. “You haven't spoken to me in half an hour, and I've asked you two questions.” “Just studying about something, Kiddo, something big. I'll tell you sometime, maybe--not now.” Slowly a great fear began to shape itself in her heart. The real man behind those slumbering eyes she had never known. Who was he? CHAPTER XIV. UNWELCOME GUESTS While she was yet puzzling over the strange mood of absorbed brooding into which Jim had fallen, his face suddenly lighted, and he changed with such rapidity that her uneasiness was doubled. They had reached the stretches of deep forest at the foot of the Black Mountain ranges. The Swannanoa had become a silver thread of laughing, foaming spray and deep, still pools beneath the rocks. The fields were few and small. The little clearings made scarcely an impression in the towering virgin forests. “Great guns, Kiddo!” he exclaimed, “this is some country! By George, I had no idea there was such a place so close to New York!”