"Well, I didn't expect anything like this. I could have got——"
"It looks like a permanent casualty. Will it go?"
"It goes for me. You're sure you don't think it's better to——"
"On your way!" she gayly ordered, but her voice caught, and she clung to him a moment before entering the car. "No; I'm not weakening—don't you think it! But let me rest a second."
She was in the car, again wearily gay. The Can hideously broke the quiet.
"Home, James!" she commanded.
Dawn found the car at rest on the verge of a hill with a wide-sweeping view over and beyond the county seat of Newbern County. Patricia slept within the fold of his arm. At least half of the slow forty miles she had slept against his shoulder in spite of the car's resounding progress over a country road. Once in the darkness she had wakened long enough to tell him not to go away.
The rising sun lighted the town of Halton below them, and sent level rays across a wide expanse of farmland beyond it, flat meadows and rolling upland. White mist shrouded the winding trail of a creek. It was the kind of landscape he had viewed yesterday with a rising distaste; land that had tricked people from their right to wander; to go places on a train when they would.
He brought his eyes back from the treacherous vista and turned them down to the face of the sleeping girl. A pale scarf was wound about her head, and he could see but little beyond it but the tip of her nose, a few scattered, minute freckles on one cheek. She was limp, one bare hand falling inertly over the edge of the seat between them. He looked out again at the checkerboard of farms. He, too, had been tricked.