space in the tonneau.

As for Terry, I could see by the set of his shoulders and the way he
held his head that he was pleased with life, for he is one of those
persons who shows his feelings in his back. He had fought against the
idea of this trip, but now that the idea was crystallizing into fact he
was happy in spite of himself. After all, what could he ask for that he
had not at this moment? The steering wheel of his beloved motor
(preserved for him by my cunning) under his hand; beside him a plucky
and beautiful girl; behind him a devoted friend; in front, the fairest
country in the world, and a road which would lead him to the Alps and to
Piedmont; to stately Milan and to the blue, rapturous reaches of Como; a
road that would beckon him on and on, past villages sleeping under
cypresses on sunny hillsides to Verona, the city of the "star-crossed
lovers;" to Giotto's Padua, and by peerless Venice to strange Dalmatia,
where Christian and Moslem look distrustfully into one anothers' eyes.

What all this would be to Terry I knew, even though he was playing a
part distasteful to him; for if he had missed being born an Irishman,
and had reconciled it to his sense of humour to be born at all, he would
certainly have been born an Italian. He loves Italy; he breathes the air
as the air of home, drawn gratefully into the lungs after a long
absence. He learned to speak Italian as easily as he learned to walk,
and he could pour out liquid line after line of old Italian poetry, if
he had not all a British male's self-conscious fear of making an ass of
himself. History was the only thing except cricket and rowing, in which
he distinguished himself at Oxford, and Italian history was to him what
novels are to most boys, though had it occurred to him at the time that
he was "improving his mind" by reading it, he would probably have shut
up the book in disgust.

He was not a stranger in the country to which we were going, though he
had never entered it by this gate, and most of his motoring had been
done in France; but I knew that he would revel in visiting once more the
places he loved, in his own car.

"Have you ever been in Italy?" I asked the Countess, but she was evilly
fascinated by a dog which seemed bent on committing suicide under our
car, and it was Beechy who answered.

"We've never been _anywhere_ before, any of us," she said. "Mamma and I
only had our machinery set running a few months ago, but now we _are_
wound up