How good it seemed to settle back among his comfortable cushions and hasten to leave this unfriendly town.
Billie at the wheel looked straight in front of her. Her heart was unquiet and her gray eyes troubled.
“If I only had the nerve to break the news to Cousin Helen that I have invited Evelyn to come with us,” she thought. “By seven o’clock we shall be there. Oh, dear! oh, dear! I have asked her, so I suppose I’ll have to stand by my own deeds, and I’m glad she’s going to run away, but I do wish she had eloped in another direction.”
The other Motor Maids were likewise troubled in their minds, and sat in uneasy silence. Miss Helen herself finally broke the quiet. First she removed a black veil, a thing she rarely wore, and replaced it with her usual blue one. Her face had resumed its normal happy expression, and the dimple had returned to her left cheek. Salt Lake City lay behind them.
“If I were not afraid of turning to a pillar of salt,” she said, smiling her old, natural smile, “I should like to look back just once on this strange town that turns its visitors from its doors, for I shall never come here again unless I’m brought in irons.”
The girls smiled, somewhat relieved that their beloved chaperone had emerged from the one fit of rage in which they had ever seen her.
“But my heart bleeds for that poor girl,” she continued. “I wish I had the power to help her. Has the child no spirit that she permits herself to be forced into this unhappy marriage?”
“Would you really like to help Evelyn Stone if you had a chance, Cousin Helen?” asked Billie suddenly.
“I only wish I had the chance, dear,” exclaimed the other charitably.
Billie gave the merest blink of a wink to Nancy and increased the Comet’s speed to forty miles an hour.