Milord."

"Why, Terry," exclaimed I, "I never thought--I never expected--I'm
hanged if you're not a real professional. It's awfully smart, and very
becoming--never saw you look better in your life. But it's--er--a kind
of masquerade, you know. I'm not sure you ought to do it. If Innisfallen
saw you like that, he'd cross you out of his will."

"He's dead certain to have done that already. When I engaged as your
chauffeur I engaged as your chauffeur and I intend to look the part as
well as act it. I want this car to be as smart as it can, which
unfortunately isn't saying much, and towards that end I've been doing my
best these last three or four days. She isn't bad, is she?"

"From being positively plain, if not ugly, she has become almost a
beauty," I replied. "But I thought you were determined to preserve her
from the sin of vanity? Why this change of mind?"

"Well, I couldn't stand Dalmar-Kalm running her down," Terry confessed
rather sheepishly. "There was so little time, that half the work on her
I've done myself."

"That accounts, then, for your long and mysterious absences."

"Only partly. I've been working like a navvy, at a mechanic's shop,
fagging up a lot of things I knew how to do on principle, but had seldom
or never done with my own hands. I was always a lazy beggar, I'm afraid,
and it was better fun to smoke and watch my man Collet making or fitting
in a new part than to bother with it myself. This will be my first long
trip 'on my own,' you see, and I don't want to be a duffer, especially
as I myself proposed going down into Dalmatia, where we may get into no
end of scrapes."

"By Jove!" I exclaimed, gazing with a new respect at my leather-clad
friend and his car. "You've got some good stuff in you, Terry. I didn't
quite realize what a responsibility I was throwing on you, old chap,
when I named you as my chauffeur. Except for my drives with you, I
suppose I haven't been in a motor half a dozen times in my life, now I
come to think of it and it always seemed to me that, if a man knew how
to drive his own car, he must know how to do everything else that was
necessary."

"Very few do, even expert drivers, among amateurs. A man ought to be
able not only to take his car entirely to pieces and put it together
again, but to go into a mechanic's shop and make a new one. I don't say
that I can do that, but I can come a bit nearer to it than I could five
days ago. I don't think that the poor old car will b