"Now, look at that, Christine!" cried Tilly, who was not in the play, and had screamed quite spontaneously. "Well," cried Bell, coming forward nobly with her part, "that settles it for me. Trooper won't come, he's scared Joanna'll see him, so I'm going to walk. You'll have to risk it yourself, Christine." "Aw, come along and drive us home, Trooper," cried Maggie. "I'm just too tired to walk up the hill." "Say, I would now, but I can't leave here, girls. I was to meet Captain Morris here at five." He turned as if with a sudden inspiration. "Here, now. Here's Mr. Sutherland. Why don't you ask him to drive you? He's the very fellow for the job. Can't you drive these girls up the hill, Wallace? Here they are all scared to death, man." "The very job for me!" cried Wallace gallantly. "I'll drive you across Canada if you'll let me, Miss Christine. Hop in girls. Is there room for us all?" For a moment Christina hesitated, a moment of weakness. She had suddenly seen through the joke. It was a plan to get Wallace to drive off with the girls right under his mother's nose. She felt too deeply on the subject to take part in any such foolish jest. But she could not very well stop the impetuous young man who had scrambled into the buggy, and was now seated between her and Bell, while Maggie placed herself upon Bell's knee. And while she hesitated he caught up the lines with a gay flourish. "Now, we'll all likely be killed," he cried. "But what's the difference so long as we die happy!" And he gave Dolly a terrible lash with the whip and shouted, "Get along there, you." Now in all Dolly's quiet well-ordered life she had never felt anything but the gentlest encouragement from a whip, neither had anything in her memory ever pulled on her mouth in this dreadful manner. There was both terror and indignation in the leap she gave into the air, and the ignorant driver, taken quite unaware, pulled on one line so that the buggy was almost overturned. Then away they went at a gallop up the street, first on the edge of one ditch, then on the edge of the other, while the two plotters left on the veranda, ready to fall over with laughter, suddenly became sober as they saw a chance of their joke ending in a catastrophe. There was no feigning in Bell's terror now. She had turned pale, and was crying out, "Oh, Christine, take the lines, take the lines!" But Christina needed no bidding. Already she had caught the reins in her strong brown hands, shoving the young man's aside sharply. "You, you idiot!" was what she said, though she did not know it until afterwards. She was too angry to say more, too genuinely alarmed. With the firm familiar hand on the lines, and Christina's voice calling soothingly, Dolly's panic began to subside. She came down to a canter, then to a trot. "Well!" cried the young man in real amazement. "She is some horse. How do you ever manage to drive her?"