et us go past to
where my machine stood. We heard voices back in the repair shop and a
hum of swift whirring shafts and pulleys. Worth kept with me. It
embarrassed me--made me nervous. It was as though he had some notion of
my purpose there. Hughes, at his lathe, caught sight of us and growled
over his shoulder,

"Yer machine's ready."

This wouldn't do. I stepped to the door, with,

"Fixed the radiator, did you?"

"Sure. Whaddye think?" Hughes was at work on something for a girl; she
perched at one end of his bench, swinging her feet. Worth, behind me,
touched my shoulder, and I saw that the girl over there was Barbara
Wallace.

She looked up at us and smiled. The sun slanting through dirt covered
windows, made color effects on her silken black hair. Eddie gave us
another scowl and went on with his work.

"Hello, Bobs," Worth's greeting was casual. "Thought I'd stop and tell
you I was on my way--you know." A glance of understanding passed between
them. "Better come along?"

"I'd like to," she smiled. "You'll be back by dinner time. If it wasn't
the last day, and I hadn't promised--"

Neither of them in any hurry.

"Hughes," I said, "there's another thing needs doing on that car of
mine--"

"Can't do nothing at all till I finish her job," he shrugged me off.

"All right," and I stepped through into the grassy back yard, put a
smoke in my face, and began walking up and down, my glance, each time I
turned, encountering that queer bunch inside: Worth, hands in pockets;
the chauffeur he had discharged--and that I was waiting to get for
murder--bending at his vise; Barbara's shining dark head close to the
tousled unkemptness of his poll, as she explained to him the pulley
arrangement needed to raise and anchor the banner she and Skeet were
painting.

Suddenly, at the far end of my beat, I was brought up by a little outcry
and stir. As I wheeled toward the door, I saw Bobs and Worth in it,
apparently wrestling over something. Laughing, crying, she hung to his
wrist with one hand, the other covering one of her eyes.

"Let me look!" he demanded. "I won't touch it, if you don't want me to.
You have got something in there, Bobs."

But when she reluctantly gave him his chance, he treacherously went for
her with a corner of his handkerchief in the traditional way, and she
backed off, uttering a cry that fetched Hughes around from the lathe,
roaring at Worth, above the noise of the machinery,

"What's the matter