't seen you for an age, old man."

Jim accepted with a promptitude which proclaimed a mind relieved of its
final burden, and he turned to Lou. Mr. Van Ness had gone out to see to
his car, and they were alone at a far corner of the counter.

"How about it, Lou? The last lap! The last fifteen miles. It's been a
long pull sometimes, and we've had some rough going, but it was worth
it, wasn't it?"

Her eyes all unconsciously gave him answer even before she repeated
softly:

"'The last lap.' Oh, Jim, shall I see you some time, at this lady's
house where you are takin' me?"

"Every day," he promised, adding with cheerful mendacity: "I dine with
her nearly all the time; have for years. Come on, Lou. Harry's waving at
us."

Through the village and the pleasant rolling country beyond; past huge,
wide-spreading estates and tiny cottages, and clusters of small shops
with the trolley winding like a thread between, the big maroon car sped,
while the two men talked together of many things, and the girl sat back
in her corner of the roomy tonneau and gave herself up to vague dreams.

Then the cottages gave place to sporadic growths of brick and mortar
with more open lots between, but even these gaps finally closed, and Lou
found herself being borne swiftly through street after street of
towering houses out upon a broad avenue with palaces such as she had
never dreamed of on one side, and on the other the seared, drooping
green of a city park in late summer.

It was still light when the big car swept into an exclusive street of
brownstone houses of an earlier and still more exclusive period, and
stopped before the proudest of these.

Jim alighted and held out his hand.

"Come, Lou," he said. "Journey's end."

CHAPTER IX

The Long, Long Trail

Three hours later, in that same proudly exclusive house, an elderly lady
with gray hair and an aristocratically high, thin nose paced the floor
of her drawing-room with a vigor which denoted some strong emotion.

"I must say, John, that I think the whole affair, whatever it may be, is
highly reprehensible. I supposed James to be up in Canada on a fishing
trip when he telephoned me this morning from somewhere near town with
a--a most extraordinary message----"

She broke off, glancing cautiously toward a room across the hall, and
added: "He said he had something to tell me, and he would be here this
evening. Now you come, and you appear to know something about it, but I