It had required more than eloquence or tact, it had required actual compulsion to bring Corrie Rose back to race at Long Island. All his successful work, all the cordiality that met him wherever he went, and the temptation to essay new conquest, failed to overcome his repugnance. But he could not defy Gerard.
"I don't see how you can bear to look at the place," he had flung, in his final defeat.
"My dear Corrie, I am not any further from that here than there," Gerard had quietly replied.
Corrie understood, and submitted dumbly thereafter. And, in spite of himself, his first day's practice on the course swept everything aside except eager exhilaration. He was too superbly healthy for morbidity, too masculine for continuous dwelling in memories; if Gerard had not been very certain of that fact, he would never have brought his ward there. When Corrie was driving, Corrie was happy. He drove with a sober intensity of devotion, his passion was serious, whereas Gerard had raced fire-ardent and won or lost laughing.
There was a small hotel near the course which the motor-men had made a rendezvous. Here Gerard established his party, during the two weeks of practice work. He did not choose to have Corrie in New York, although Rupert chafed and he himself was obliged to go in to the city frequently, at considerable inconvenience.
On the last afternoon before the race, he returned from such a trip, and arrived before the hotel just as Corrie rolled up with the Mercury Titan and halted it opposite him.
"It's five o'clock," the driver explained, stilling his roaring motor and leaning out. "Everyone is coming in, to get ready for to-morrow."
There was little trace left of the petulant, gaudily dressed boy who a year before had driven the pink car, in this serious young professional clad in the Mercury's racing gray and bearing the Mercury's silver insignia on his shoulder. The bend of his mouth was firmer, his dark-blue eyes had acquired the steady, all-embracing keenness of Gerard's—the gaze of all those men with whom the inopportune flicker of an eyelid may mean destruction. He was clothed with his virile youth as with a radiant garment, as he smiled across at Gerard.
"Yes, get some rest; you will be out at dawn," approved Gerard, coming closer. "Where is Rupert? What is the matter, Corrie? You look disturbed."