A second time Miss Herron considered in silence. She turned deliberately and looked at Lucy, who returned her questioning glance with a stare of babylike innocence; her gray eyes interrogated the boy.
“If you can assure me that your machine can’t go,” said Miss Herron, “I’ll tow you.”
For a brief second Archibald hesitated. Then he fumbled among the levers; raised the hood again; returned to the driver’s seat, and fingered at something the ladies could not see. “She can’t be moved,” the boy reported.
From the fence along the roadside a loosened rail was wrenched; an honest cow, picketed at pasture, had her tether shortened a dozen feet in two strokes of the boy’s knife. In five minutes more, amid many warnings from Miss Herron against scratching the varnish, one end of the rail was made fast to the rear axle of the carriage, and the other to the automobile.
“Now jump in,” ordered Lucy, radiant with smiles; and she pointed to the back seat.
“Mr. Fraser,” her cousin amended, calmly, “will continue in his automobile. To—to steer, if necessary.”
“But——”
“I should prefer it, if you please.” The horses strained forward, the wheels turned; the triumphal procession was under way. “My dear,” said Miss Herron, “will you be good enough to hold your parasol over me? The sun is very uncomfortable.”
All the way home, the length of Barham Street, where the people stared and laughed, young Fraser repeated all the maledictions he could remember or invent. For the dust choked him, and the view of Lucy’s back as she sat holding the parasol over her cousin did not cheer.
“I’ll get even—oh, more than even!—with you, dear lady,” he promised, releasing his tiller to shake his fist at Miss Herron’s unconscious and unbending figure, “if it takes all summer. I wonder if she could have guessed. And it was planned so perfectly.”