"I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a liar." René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his head about it any more. "Bad enough," he said, "to have a legal speed limit without having a private limit in the home." A letter from Linda reached René at one of their stopping-places. She declared herself terrified at the thought of his being with her brother. "Do keep him from going more than thirty miles an hour." At once René was on her side against Kurt and exasperated him by asking perpetually: "What are we doing now?" To which Kurt invariably replied: "Damn near fifty." The tour ended in a river in Derbyshire. Kurt took a curly wooden bridge at thirty miles an hour, carried away the railing, and plunged René and machine into six feet of water. Kurt could not swim, and René hauled him out and screamed at him: "You deserve to be killed! You deserve to be killed! Taking the bridge like that." Kurt grinned: "You don't know how funny you looked in the bath-chair toppling over. What a smash! What idiots to have a bridge like that. It's no good for anything except a push-bike. I'll get a car if the insurance people stump up." René was really shocked at his callousness, and as they sat in blankets while their clothes were being dried, he took him to task, delivered himself of a pedagogic exhortation and ended by saying: "Kurt! Kurt! I believe you have no feeling!" "Nerves! What's the good of them anyway? But I'm jolly grateful to you for pulling me out. I must learn to swim. It might be jolly awkward if I tried to fly to America. Wouldn't it be grand if I was the first man to do it?" Something in the boy's tone thrilled René and he felt a pang, a sudden, painful knowledge that he loved Kurt, and, when he was left alone, Kurt's clothes having dried first, he was faintly uneasy, half wondering, yet not admitting the doubt to himself, whether he had really loved anybody else. Then he told himself that it was only because Kurt had treated him with his boy's frankness, and because he had not with anybody else been brought face to face with anything so terrible as death. And then he found himself in a brief dream asking if life also was not terrible, and love? And if----? But such thoughts he refused to think. Into his brooding happiness had come a new zest, and he would not waste one moment of it upon doubt, philosophic or particular. They returned to Thrigsby by train, and René found himself committed to a lie about the accident. If the truth came out, said Kurt, his mother would not allow him to have that car.