A quarter of an hour after I had first entered the garage I was sitting at the chauffeur's side as the car slowly made its way up the crooked quaint old-fashioned main street of Swanage and out on the big white road that ran up hill and down valley, the picturesque highway to Dorchester. Up to Corfe Castle the way was nearly all uphill, but the "Fiat" ran splendidly, and in the narrow winding road where we met many pleasure parties in _chars-a-banc_ Gibbs quickly showed himself a competent driver. Seldom he blew his horn, yet he handled the car with a care that at once convinced me that he was a reliable chauffeur. As we skirted the great mound upon which stood the cyclopean walls of Corfe, magnificent relics of the bygone feudal age, and ran again out of the little village and up on to Purbeck Hill, he handed me a pair of goggles, saying:-- "You'd better have these, sir. We're going through a lot of dust presently, and we've a dead head-wind." I put them on, and as I did so he increased the speed, remarking:-- "Fortunately, there ain't any police traps 'ere. We aren't like they are in Surrey. I got fined a fiver at Guildford a month ago, an' I was only goin' fourteen miles an 'our. But it ain't any good defendin'. The police are always in the right," he added, with a sigh. "Do you think that we shall overtake them?" I inquired anxiously, for at all hazards I wanted to see and speak again with Ella. What she had told me excited my curiosity and aroused my determination that she should make no further self-sacrifice. "It all depends," was his vague answer. "They've got a `forty,' you know, an' can do these hills much better than we can. But they may get a puncture or a tyre-burst." "But as to speed. They won't go quicker than we are travelling?" I inquired. "Not if they don't want to get 'ad up," he grinned, and I then recognised that we were on a wide flat road, travelling at nearly forty miles an hour, and raising a perfect wall of dust behind us. "There's one or two level-crossings, too, that may delay 'em." "And us also, eh?" "Perhaps," he said. "But what I'm going to do is to go at a greater speed than they've gone. We've got nearly an hour and a half to make up, by some means or other." And lowering his head he set his shoulders in his seat and still increased the speed until we flew at a pace such as I had never before travelled in any motor-car. The engines ticked away with rhythmical music, the machinery hummed with that even tone which tells the practised motorist that his cylinders are working properly, and without once pulling up, we soon found ourselves slowing down to enter the quiet old county town of Dorchester. At Charminster, where the two high-roads parted, we had news of the blue car we were following. A man breaking stones at the roadside informed us that it had passed about half an hour in front of us.