ox-cart. Their progress
became a series of illustrations of the fable of the hare and the
tortoise. They passed horses, and the horses shied into the ditch: then
the same horses passed them, usually at the periods chosen by the demon
under the hood to fire its pistol shots, and into the ditch went the
horses once more, their owners expressing their thoughts in language at
once vivid and unrestrained.

It is one of the blessed compensations of life that in times of
prosperity we do not remember our miseries. In these enlightened days,
when everybody owns an automobile and calmly travels from Chicago to
Boston if he chooses, we have forgotten the dark ages when these machines
were possessed by devils: when it took sometimes as much as three hours
to go twenty miles, and often longer than that. How many of us have had
the same experience as Honora!

She was always going to take the train, and didn't. Whenever her mind was
irrevocably made up, the automobile whirled away on all four cylinders
for a half a mile or so, until they were out of reach of the railroad.
There were trolley cars, to be sure, but those took forever to get
anywhere. Four o'clock struck, five and six, when at last the fiend who
had conspired with fate, having accomplished his evident purpose of
compelling Honora to miss her dinner, finally abandoned them as suddenly
and mysteriously as he had come, and the automobile was a lamb once more.
It was half-past six, and the sun had set, before they saw the lights
twinkling all yellow on the heights of Fort George. At that hour the last
train they could have taken to reach the dinner-party in time was leaving
the New York side of the ferry.

"What will they think?" cried Honora. "They saw us leave Delmonico's at
two o'clock, and they didn't know we were going to Westchester."

It needed no very vivid imagination to summon up the probable remarks of
Mrs. Chandos on the affair. It was all very well to say the motor broke
down; but unfortunately Trixton Brent's reputation was not much better
than that of his car.

Trixton Brent, as might have been expected, was inclined to treat the
matter as a joke.

"There's nothing very formal about a Quicksands dinner-party," he said.
"We'll have a cosey little dinner in town, and call 'em up on the
telephone."

She herself was surprised at the spirit of recklessness stealing over
her, for there was, after all, a certain appealing glamour in the
adventure. She was t