“I hope you’re not hurt?” I started; and then, “Why, isn’t it Mrs. Scofield?”
She spoke my name; I said the obvious regrets and all that. She made the ordinary replies.
“I was going down after Mr. Scofield,” she mentioned and she spoke to the chauffeur who had come about beside me. “Thurston, if you’ll get out the other car now.”
For a moment that stumped me; for if she was going to use another car, I had to use another plan and I hadn’t another. My own machine, as I’ve commented, was in no shape to respond to an encore on the act I’d just finished. At this crisis, Thurston saved me.
“You’re all shook up, Mrs. Scofield,” he told her; and then I was sure, as I’d suspected before, that he was in on her game. He knew that I hadn’t just accidentally run him down; and he had different ideas about the advisability of trying their old plan with the other car.
He was a thin, Cassius-looking driver of about thirty and of the sort that smoke and dope, as well as think, too much. He was a smooth-shaven chap and would be good looking if the bones of his cheeks were less sharp.
“I’m all right, Thurston,” she assured him; but I saw she was thinking things over and sparring for time.
“You’d better go back into the house and rest, Mrs. Scofield,” Thurston suggested respectfully enough but strengthened the suggestion with a jerk of his head which he supposed I didn’t see.
Cars were stopping all about us and people piling out and asking questions and offering help and so on. Shirley took Thurston’s tip and let him and me assist her across the street into her house.
She thanked me beautifully and tried at once to be rid of me; but I said I’d stay awhile to make sure she suffered no bad effect from my carelessness. So she gave up in a few minutes and telephoned her husband, at his club, that she wasn’t coming down to-night and he’d better take a taxi home. I waited till I was sure he’d started in that taxi and then I left.