Gwen nodded. “I’ll like it,” she assured him. The color had mounted to her cheeks and her eyes sparkled. “All right! Hold fast! Here goes!” Then The Whizz went like a red streak down that hill on which, as Ralph had observed from the top, there was nothing to impede their progress.
They overtook the tallyho and slowed up that they need not startle the horses. They had reached the outer boundaries of the Caldwaller-Cory estate.
“Suppose I get back in the tallyho with the others,” Gwen said, “then Bobs won’t know that I had a fainting spell. If she knew it, she would feel that she ought to take me right home, and I don’t want to go.” Her smile at Ralph seemed to imply that he was her fellow-conspirator.
“I’m not going to let you go,” he heard himself saying.
So the change was made. Ralph turned The Whizz into a rear entrance, used only by delivery autos, and in that way reached the garage.
He had asked Jack Beardsley to give him time to get out on the lawn before he arrived, and so the three, who were still seated around a tea table under a spreading oak, saw Ralph coming from the house at the same time that the tallyho entered the front gate.
They little dreamed of all that had happened.
CHAPTER XXIX.
TRAGIC HOURS
And now while these young people are having a care-free, happy time in the beautiful Orange Hill country, let us return to the East Side that is sweltering in the heat of late June.
It was nine o’clock at night and the air was still breathlessly stifling. The playground that edged the East River was thronged with neighboring folk who had brought what portable bedding they had and who planned sleeping upon the ground out-of-doors to catch some possible breeze from over the water.