his attire was the loose, washable, yellow
gloves, with large gauntlets, designed to protect the delicately tended
hands when they had to explore among machinery.

He had obtained the motor-bicycle in a peculiar way. On arriving at Axe
Station for the previous Christmas holidays, he had seen two low-hung
lamps brilliantly flashing instead of the higher and less powerful lamps
of the dogcart, and there had been no light-reflecting flanks of a horse
in front of the lamps. The dark figure sitting behind the lamps proved
to be his mother. His mother herself had driven him home. He noted
calmly that as a chauffeur she had the same faults as the contemned Lois
Ingram. Still, she did drive, and they reached Ladderedge Hall in
safety. He admired, and he was a little frightened by, his mother's
terrific volition to widen her existence. She would insist on doing
everything that might be done, and nobody could stop her. Who would have
dreamt that she, with her narrow, troubled past, and her passionate
temperament rendered somewhat harsh by strange experiences, would at the
age of forty-six or so be careering about the country at the wheel of a
motor-car? Ah! But she would! She would be a girl. And by her individual
force she successfully carried it off! Those two plotters, she and his
stepfather, had conspired to buy a motor-car in secret from him. No
letter from home had breathed a word of the motor-car. He was
thunder-struck, and jealous. He had spent the whole of the Christmas
holidays in that car, and in four days could drive better than his
mother, and also--what was more difficult--could convince her obstinate
self-assurance that he knew far more about the mechanism than she did.
As a fact, her notions of the mechanism, though she was convinced of
their rightness, were mainly fantastic. George of course had had to
punish his parents. He had considered it his duty to do so. "The _least_
you can do," he had said discontentedly and menacingly, "the _least_ you
can do is to give me a decent motor-bike!" The guilty pair had made
amends in the manner thus indicated for them. George gathered from
various signs that his stepfather was steadily and rapidly growing
richer. George had acted accordingly--not only in the matter of the
motor-bicycle, but in other matters.

Now, on this June morning he had just begun to breast the slope rising
from the hollow to Hyde Park Corner when a boy shot out from behind a
huge, stationary dust-car