He shook hands with her quite civilly, and made some excuse about the show and his not feeling very funny about it. She had another girl with her, and her brother, Jerome Hubbard, the "whip" who used to drive with Mr. Fownes. When I had been introduced, she asked me to come to supper at a place I'd never heard of, and declared that her brother would have a fit if we didn't disburse some of his savings immediately. The little girl who was with her (I shan't write her name down) was a lively bit of goods, and I was ready enough to go if only to cheer up "Ferdy," who, to be sure, had become a different man already, and was talking and laughing with Maisa just as though they had been first "cousins" for a twelvemonth or more. In the end we ate Mr. Jerome's supper, and got back to our little beds at two in the morning: not an over-good preparation for a great race, as any driver will admit; but my friend seemed himself again, and I would have eaten half a dozen suppers to bring that about. This was two days before the meeting, I should tell you, and I saw little of Ferdinand until that memorable June morning, when, at half-past three precisely, Girardot got away on his C.G.V., and was followed two minutes later by Fournier on his Mors. I have taken part in many a big race since, but never one which excited me more than that famous dash from Paris to Vienna, which was to make the fortune of more than one English house, and to bring the Gordon Bennett Cup to England for the first time in the motor story. I firmly believed my friend Ferdinand was to win the race, and presentiment goes farther in this world than many folks think. Such a dashing, daring driver I never saw. His car was a wonder. I took several trips with him before the race, and I do believe that we made eighty or ninety miles an hour upon her--a miracle for those days, though not thought so much of in this year 1909. What was more, he seemed to have forgotten all about that little devil of a Maisa Hubbard and her prophecies, and when we breakfasted together upon the morning of the start I would have said that he was fit to race for his life. And what a start it was, notwithstanding the hour! What a roaring and racing of engines, cars tearing here and tearing there, gendarmes everywhere, men with silver on their heads and silver on their toes; jabbering officials telling you to do twenty things at once, and quarrelling because you did them. The enclosure itself was like the meat-market at Smithfield on a busy morning. I never heard so much noise in any one place before; and if there was a man, woman, or child who slept through it in the peaceful village of Champigny, well, he, she, or it ought to go into a museum.