apid
speed."

"But why, why?" she almost wailed. "Have you gone mad, to drive like
that?"

"Again I pledge my word that there is no risk. I mean to overtake Miss
Vanrenen before the light fails--that is all."

"Your conduct is positively outrageous," she gasped.

"Please yourself, madam. Do you go, or stay?"

She collapsed into the comfortable upholstery with a gesture of
impotent despair. Medenham was sure she would not dare to leave him.
What wretched project she and Marigny had concocted he knew not, but
its successful outcome evidently depended on Mrs. Devar's safe arrival
in Bristol. Moreover, it was a paramount condition that he should be
delayed at Cheddar, and his chief interest lay in defeating that part
of the programme. Without another word, he released the brakes, and
the car sped onward.

Now they were plunging into a magnificent defile shadowed by sheer
cliffs that on the eastern side rose to a height of five hundred feet.
Fluttering rock pigeons circled far up in the azure riband that
spanned the opposing precipices. From many a towering pinnacle,
carved by the ages into fantastic imageries of a castle, a pulpit,
a lion, or a lance, came the loud, clear calling of innumerable
jack-daws. It was dark and gloomy, most terrifying to Mrs. Devar,
down there on the twining road where the car boomed ever on like
some relentless monster rushing from its lair. But the Cheddar
gorge, though majestic and awe-inspiring, is not of great extent.
Soon the valley widened, the road took longer sweeps to round each
frowning buttress, and at last emerged, with a quality of inanimate
breathlessness, on to the bleak and desolate tableland of the Mendips.

At this point, had Cynthia been there, Medenham would have stopped
for a while, so that she might admire the far-flung panorama of the
"island valley of Avallon" that stretched below the ravine. Out of
the green pastures in the middle distance rose the ruined towers of
Glastonbury. The purple and gold of Sedgemoor, relieved by the soft
outlines of the Polden hills, the grim summits of Taunton Dean and the
Blackdown range, the wooded Quantocks dipping to the Severn, and the
giant mass of Exmoor bounding the far horizon,--these great splashes
of color, softened and blended by belts of farmland and the blue smoke
of clustering hamlets, formed a picture that not even Britain's
storehouse of natural beauty can match too often to sate the eyes of
those who love a charming