But as she smiled so, she drove that menacing bonnet ever more furiously along the road to Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets before our head-lights and Hugo and Shirley, who sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying that it would be bad for their reputation as a happily-married couple to be found dead on the road to Maidenhead. “A friend of mine,” yelled Hugo, “was asked to resign from Buck’s for being found dead on the Maidenhead road....” But Iris drove faster and ever faster, and suddenly I realised that the rare devouring smile that was like my enemy on her face was new to me who had never before seen Iris smile happily. II I have gone too far ahead in the tale of the last March, letting myself be beguiled from a narrator’s duties by the reckless flight of the silver stork through the quiet countryside. But from the night of the children’s party I can only go back by saying that she was wearing that night not her silver turban but a green hat, yea, a green hat, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn; and who but I had bought that green hat for her that very day, she having said to me after luncheon that she needed a green hat _pour le sport_. I understood that the _sport_ would be under even warmer skies than ours, for in three days’ time, she said, she would be on board ship for Rio di Janeiro, and she did not need to tell me that she would not be voyaging unaccompanied. That was a fell lady for whom I bought a green hat that day. Nothing easier than a green hat, it appears, can well be bought. Like a flash of summer lightning, that is how a green hat is bought. Says the lady to the shop: “Greeting, sir. I will have a green hat _pour le sport_, similar in every way to the green hats I have bought here every year since the death of Dr. Crippen.” “Very good, madam. That will be so much, madam. On your account, madam?” “Oh, no! My friend will pay. Farewell.” We spoke very little over the luncheon we took together. It was a stifling day, and what, anyhow, was there to say? Very far from my business was it to speak of broken promises unless spoken to, and very far from her thoughts did any question of broken promises seem. Oh, but that was a fell lady who luncheoned with me on that sweltering day! We sat picking at green olives and salads and bits of toast, we drank those long iced drinks full of vegetable matter which, apparently, one must drink so that one may feel the heat more poignantly than before, we had nothing in particular to say. Early that morning she had rung me up, a calm, happy voice, demanding from me not the smallest expression of surprise at her presence in London; although, of course, one did make a show of being surprised, for she couldn’t possibly know that I had seen her in that cab, and, I thought, she never would know. The Marches would be let off that, anyhow.