Mary knew it to a certainty. No woman who owned the piece of lingerie that graced her shoulders would ever fail to recognize it.
"Try the road to the left," she urged, as she looked back. "I think they're turning the car around."
He acted on the suggestion, for want of anything better, and shot into a new road that possessed the grateful advantage of poorer illumination. Fear of pursuit caused him to forsake it after a few hundred yards, and after that he spent several minutes dodging into one street after another, until he felt that the touring car must have abandoned pursuit. Every time they passed a street light he accelerated speed, regardless of all considerations save a resolve not to linger in the illuminated places.
Mary was grim. She had abandoned hope of ever escaping from the hated town; she felt that she was the helpless prisoner of a nightmare, unable to loose the invisible shackles. They would either be dashed to pieces or fall afoul of the law, and between these alternatives she attempted to make no choice; one was as unhappy as the other. Yet during all this maddening and futile whirl she found a corner of her mind sufficiently detached from imminent perils to give its entire attention to the hating of Bill Marshall. He, and he alone, had done this thing, she told herself over and over again. Oh, how she hated him!
And then came sudden liberation from the labyrinth. They shot out of a narrow lane upon what was unmistakably the main road, missed a juggernaut limousine by inches, careened sickeningly as their machine straightened out in the direction of the city, and then gathered speed to put behind them forever the place of their undoing.
"We're all clear, now," he called, bending his head toward her. "Making out all right?"
"Go on," was her only answer.
There was but one goal in the mind of Pete Stearns—the Marshall mansion in lower Fifth Avenue. It was of no avail to stop short of that; they had no money, no friends, no spare wardrobe elsewhere. A return to Larchmont was not for an instant to be considered. Probably the Sunshine was back in the harbor, looking for them. Well, let Bill Marshall look—and then worry when he did not find them. The same thought was in the mind of Mary Wayne; she prayed that Bill might now be in a frenzy of fright and anxiety.
In a general way, Pete knew the main road; if he had not, the volume of traffic easily served as a guide. They passed anywhere from a dozen to twenty cars every mile, and inasmuch as speed was their one available refuge from curious eyes, Pete employed it. It would have been better for peace of mind to make their way to the city by sequestered roads, but he did not know all the byways and turnings of the Westchester highway system, and there was the risk of getting lost in unfamiliar paths. The labyrinth of Larchmont had been a sufficient lesson in that.
The evening was warm, yet Pete found that two sets of silken pajamas were none too much for comfort, for the motor-cycle created its own little gale. Mary sat crouched in her lingerie, trying desperately to keep everything in place, yet discovering every little while that a homeward-bound pennant of filmy stuff was whipping the air half a dozen feet behind her.