Jimmie saw that she was suffering, and trembling with fear and self reproach, and he did the best he could. He said: "Let's drive back, and I'll choke Jethniah's wife to death with the soap. She's to blame for all this." "But will you promise, Jimmie?" "Of course, I'll promise! What is it, dear?" He was ready to promise her the setting sun. "Will you promise me never to have anything to do with that woman?" "Jean Bradley? Why, yes, sure I promise, if you wish it. That's easy, and all settled. We'll probably never see her again anyway. But I do wish you had put in something about Jethniah's wife. If ever a woman deserved choking, and with soap--I insist on the soap, it is certainly that woman." But Augusta was not to be turned aside by his diversion. "I'm afraid," she confessed, shrinking in closer to him so that she seemed so little and so forlorn that Jimmie instinctively put his hand on hers to stop her, "afraid that I would be coward enough to want you to stay even if I knew you wanted to go. And then you'd begin to talk. And you'd be so kind and so bright and jolly that I'd begin to let myself be fooled. You know how you can talk. You can make anybody almost believe anything. Please, darling," she pleaded, "promise you won't ever use it to deceive me!" Wardwell silently cursed the gift of his glib and ready tongue, while he tried to find the right words for this. After a little he said humbly: "Augusta, to your knowledge I'm a good many kinds of a fool. But let me tell you something that I know about you, and me. If I should ever be that particular kind of fool, do you know what would happen? Well, in the first place, you'd know it before I knew it myself. And before I'd get around to know it, you'd snap me loose and send me spinning so fast that I'd never know just what happened." "Oh, Jimmie, don't let me think of it! I could not bear it, and live." "There are other, more immediate, things to be thought of. Our patient Donahue is thinking hard on some of them this minute. In the first place, he is wondering if he is expected to work nights." Donahue, who was by now accustomed to the name which had been thrust upon him, stopped and looked around at Augusta. "I'm sorry, Donahue," she apologized cheerfully. "I know you are hungry and so is Jimmie. And it's all my fault. But really we can't stop right here. This is just the middle of a field. We'll just go on up to the edge of that little woods. And there we'll stop all day tomorrow, if you like, and think about things." Jimmie tightened up on the rein, and Donahue plodded on obediently.