"We are going a great pace, and you are not dressed for motoring; you must be cold. Will you wrap yourself in this?" and, drawing from behind him a heavy fur coat, which he had brought as an extra wrap, if necessary, he handed it to Christina, who gratefully rolled herself in its warm folds.
"By Jove! she looks more fetching than ever, with her face looking out of all that fur," the blue-eyed young man reflected, when he again glanced over his shoulder at her, "those green eyes of hers are like no others I ever saw," and Christina, little as she was in the habit of considering such things, could not help noticing how often during their three-miles' drive, the young man turned to look at her, or to shout a remark. The grey-eyed man looked round only once, to say shortly but kindly:
"Quite comfortable?" But even those two words in the vibrating voice, had, as before, an oddly thrilling effect on Christina's pulses.
That rapid drive across the moorland, in the low sunlight of the December afternoon, seemed to her for long afterwards, like part of some extraordinary dream—a dream in which she, and the grey-eyed man, and the beautiful white-faced woman, were all playing parts; a dream which had no real relation at all to the commonplace details of everyday life.
"Here is Manborough," Rupert called out, when, over the brow of a steep hill, they came in sight of clustering red-roofed houses amongst pine woods; "now where does the doctor live? What is his name?"
"Doctor Martin Stokes is his name; I don't know what his house is called, but Manborough is only a small place," Christina answered. "If you will very kindly put me down in the main street, I shall easily find the right house."
"Oh, no, we will drive you up in state," was the laughing rejoinder; and the car once more slowed down, whilst Rupert put a question to a passing rustic, who jerked his thumb to the right.
"Doctor's house be up among they pines," he said; "Doctor calls 'un Pinewood Lodge."
"Unromantic and ordinary person, that doctor," said Rupert, with a short laugh; "this country and those woods might inspire a man to invent a name with some sort of poetry in it. Ah! here is the lodge in question—and as ordinary as its name," he concluded, stopping the car before a closed brown gate, through which a well-kept drive led to a red-brick house, that might have been transplanted bodily to these heights, from a London suburb.
"I don't know how to say thank you properly," Christina said a little tremulously, when she stood by the brown gate, helped out of the car by the blue-eyed young man, who had skilfully forestalled Rupert in this act of gallantry; "it is very, very good of you to have helped me, and will you please forgive me for being so bold and stopping you as I did?"