"I'm much obliged to you for bringing me over," he observed awkwardly.
"That's all right."
The man in the brown jeans started his engine.
"Say, Mr. O'Malley!" called Stephen desperately.
"Well?"
"You—you—won't tell my father about my taking the car, will you?" he pleaded wretchedly.
"I tell him?"
Never had he heard so much scorn compressed into three words.
"You need have no worries," declared the man over his shoulder, a contemptuous sneer curling his lips. "I confess my own wrong-doing but I do not tattle the sins of other people. Your father will never be the wiser about you so far as I am concerned. Whatever you want him to know you will have to tell him yourself."
Baffled, mortified, and stinging with humiliation as if he had been whipped, Stephen watched him disappear round the bend of the road.