“You’re motoring, too?” he asked.
“No. I–The fact is–” Jim stammered in his turn. “We were thinking of taking the train─”
“Why not let me take you both down in the car?” The other rose to the occasion with evident alacrity. “Miss Lacy will like it better than the train, I’m sure, and I haven’t seen you for an age, old man.”
Jim accepted with a promptitude which proclaimed a mind relieved of its final burden, and he turned to Lou. Mr. Van Ness had gone out to see to his car, and they were alone at a far corner of the counter.
“How about it, Lou? The last lap! The last fifteen miles. It’s been a long pull sometimes, and we’ve had some rough going, but it was worth it, wasn’t it?”
Her eyes all unconsciously gave him answer even before she repeated softly:
136“‘The last lap.’ Oh, Jim, shall I see you some time, at this lady’s house where you are takin’ me?”
“Every day,” he promised, adding with cheerful mendacity: “I dine with her nearly all the time; have for years. Come on, Lou. Harry’s waving at us.”
Through the village and the pleasant rolling country beyond; past huge, wide-spreading estates and tiny cottages, and clusters of small shops with the trolley winding like a thread between, the big maroon car sped, while the two men talked together of many things, and the girl sat back in her corner of the roomy tonneau and gave herself up to vague dreams.
Then the cottages gave place to sporadic growths of brick and mortar with more open lots between, but even these gaps finally closed, and Lou found herself being borne swiftly through street after street of towering houses out upon a broad avenue with palaces such as she had never dreamed of on one side, and on the other the seared, drooping green of a city park in late summer.