* * * * *
Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums, stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out that road—a lightning-streak of them—fearing neither penal law nor Dead Man's Curve.
Slacking only to be slacked, cars dart off the road and up a gravel driveway that encircles Claxton Inn like a lariat swung, then park themselves among the trees, lights dimmed. Placid as a manse without, what was once a private and now a public house maintains through lowered lids its discreet white-frame exterior, shades drawn, and only slightly revealing the parting of lace curtains. It is rearward where what was formerly a dining-room that a huge, screened-in veranda, very whitely lighted, juts suddenly out, and a showy hallway, bordered in potted palms, leads off that. Here Discretion dares lift her lids to rove the gravel drive for who comes there.
In a car shaped like a motor-boat and as low to the ground Mr. Charley Cox turned in and with a great throttling and choking of engine drew up among the dim-eyed monsters of the grove and directly alongside an eight-cylinder roadster with a snout like a greyhound.
"Aw, Charley, I thought you promised you wasn't going to stop!"
"Honey, sweetness, I just never was so dry."
Miss Hassiebrock laid out a hand along his arm, sitting there in the quiet car, the trees closing over them.
"There's Yiddles Farm a little farther out, Charley; let's stop there for some spring water."
He was peeling out of his gauntlets, and cramming them into spacious side pockets.
"Water, honey, can wash me, but it can't quench me."