"Rupert got off at the corner, back there. I suppose if I look rattled, that he is what is the matter. He——" Corrie suddenly dropped his face in his folded arms as they rested upon the steering-wheel, his shoulders shaking.
"He? How? He has been talking to you?"
"He sure has been talking to me," Corrie affirmed, lifting his laughter-flushed face. "When I think that he once gave me the silence treatment! His tongue would take the starch out of a Chinese laundry and make a taxicab chauffeur feel he couldn't drive."
"You do not let him talk to you when you are driving!"
"Oh, when I am driving he is the perfect mechanician. He wouldn't open his lips if I hit a right-angle turn at ninety miles an hour or disobey if I told him to climb out and cut the tires off the rear wheels. No, it is when I am not officially driving that he gives me some remarks to study about. Good pointers, too! I like it, really. I only wish," his expression shadowed abruptly, "I only wish I didn't have to remember that nothing could bring him to shake hands with me."
"Corrie——"
"I know—I beg your pardon for speaking of that to you. But, Gerard," he bent to grasp a lever, "I'd take what you got last year, I'd consent to be picked up dead from under my car to-morrow, if I could that way buy one hour to stand clean before you and Jack Rupert. That's all—don't think I want to flinch, please. If you will go on in, I'll put this machine away and be back to dinner in fifteen minutes. I see Rupert coming to help me, now. We're starved to death and some tired. By the way, George shouted over to me that he would be in as soon as he got the Duplex canned for the night, and to order a few dozen eggs and a couple of hams fried for him. Would you attend to it on your way in?"
"I surely would," Gerard answered, the great gentleness of his tone mating oddly with the light words. "What do you want ordered for yourself?"
"Anything, and plenty of it."