Archie laughed shortly. “Please forget that I so far forgot myself,” he begged. “It was wrong, under the present circumstances.” All the boy’s sunny malice shone from his clear eyes. “I ought to have remembered my real duty and pleasure.”
“And that,” Miss Herron asked, for once caught unawares, as it appeared, “is what?”
“Watch!” said Archie, briefly.
They had come by now to the beginning of the solid macadam road that runs across the county, to the joy of the chauffeur as to the corresponding dismay of the truck farmers for whom it was constructed. There was nothing ahead to break the long, hard track. Archie reached down beside him, though his eyes never left his course or one hand the steering wheel, and set his hand to some lever. The song of the great machine was for a second broken; then a new song of the road began, louder and fiercer than the first and in quicker measure. Miss Herron felt as she did the first time she descended in the express elevator of a high office building. She was conscious that her hat was tugging at its pins. She settled herself back deeper in the seat and braced her feet stiffly, only to bounce up as they ran over some stick.
“Oh!” she gasped. “Ahem!”
“Sit tight,” counseled Archie, suavely. “We’ll get there in time, all right, if nothing happens.”
“If anything breaks,” she remarked, “you can usually get somebody to tow the machine home.”
“People are very charitable. Yes, Miss Herron.”
“Up to a point.”
And to that Archie had no rejoinder. It was perhaps as well that he did not see the smile that his passenger wore. It might have taken the edge off his revenge.