"I'll look out where you back; let her go," commanded Sylvester, and Samuel backed his car out of the narrow space where it had stood between Sylvester's big brown limousine and Stephen's modest phaëton. Samuel used care until he had made the curves from barn to road, between trees and hedges and the brown remains of a garden, out through the old stone-posted gateway. Then, with a straight turnpike road before him and the city only twenty miles away, Samuel opened his throttle. The slim, powerful machine, its exhaust, unmuffled, roaring a deep note of power, shot away down the road like the wind.
At a window inside Mr. William Kingsley was watching excitedly. A tall figure of the general proportions of his sister Isabel's husband, James Dent, was at his elbow. "By George!" he ejaculated, "Syl's gone with Sam!"
Mr. George Kingsley, partially deaf, caught his own first name. "What's that, Will?" he responded eagerly.
William wheeled and saw whom he was addressing. George, his anxious eyes peering down the road, was plainly not thinking of family quarrels. Why should anybody think of family quarrels with Sam's young Syl lying upstairs looking as if the life had been knocked out of him by that terrific fall? William found himself unable to answer this question.
"Sylvester's gone with Sam after Doctor Graham," he announced in George's interrogative best ear.
"You don't say!" responded George. "Well, it's a good thing."
It certainly was. Not a member of the family but would admit that. Also, if it was a good thing for Sylvester and Sam to tear down the road together in a sixty-horse-power car, after a quarrel the proportions of which anybody must concede were far more serious than those of the difficulty between George and William, it would seem rather forced, at least until the truth was known about young Syl, for two other brothers looking out of the same window to cling to outward signs of estrangement.
"Sam's got an extremely powerful machine," observed William, continuing to gaze down the road, though the aforesaid machine was already probably a mile away and far out of sight.
"I guess he has. Must go faster than Sylvester's, I should say."
"Sylvester's isn't made so much for speed as for getting about the city warm and comfortable for his wife. Syl's not much on speed, as I remember. Shouldn't wonder if Sam's pace going to meet the doctor would make Syl hang on some."