the matter."

"Would you have gone with him in his shirt-sleeves? He's plainly in a
shirt-sleeve mood to-night."

"I think a drive in the moonlight with a 'brute of a saint' in
shirt-sleeves, with arms like those, might be interesting," mused the
guest, indicating invisible patterns on the porch with the toe of a
white slipper.

"He would probably talk cars and engines every mile in the most
matter-of-fact way," Winifred Chester assured her. "No woman yet has
ever been able, as far as this town knows, to strike a spark of romance
out of Red Pepper Burns."

"Yet he has red hair," murmured the guest to herself, and continued to
look thoughtfully down the street along which the Green Imp had shot out
toward the open! country beyond.

Out in that open country, miles away, the car running with that
exquisite precision of rotating cylinder explosions which is music to
the trained ear of the mechanic at the wheel, the two men sat silent.
The pace of the Green Imp was one to cut off speech, for the road wets
straight and empty, stretching like a white ribbon under the stars,
with now and then a band of midnight shade crossing it where arching
tree-tops met the course which invites an open throttle and the intent
eye which goes with it.

Suddenly the car struck aside from the straightaway and with open
cut-out roared up a steep hill by means of which a narrow road led
off toward a part of the country not often selected by motorists for
pleasure spins. Chester recognized that his companion had a purpose
beyond that of "trying out" his engine, unless, indeed, the tough and
rocky grade were a test. But Burns was still silent, and the other man
applied himself to holding on. A mile up the road the car came to an
abrupt standstill before a tiny house.

"Going to make a call, after all?" was on Chester's lips, but the sight
of something, showing white beside the door in the lamplight which
streamed out upon a small, decrepit porch, drove back the words.

Burns left a silent engine and strode up the straggling path with the
light tread of the heavy man whose muscles are under his control. He
walked in at the open door without knocking, and Chester caught the
sharp sound of a woman's voice at a tension, saying: "Oh, Doctor!"

It seemed to him an hour, though by his watch it was but nine minutes,
that he sat watching the little flimsy streamer of white flutter to and
fro in the lamplight, his heart beating heavily, as a father