"Are you all right?" she panted. I could see only her eyes and the outline of her face like a white shadow.
"Yes; are you?"
She laughed nervously. "I'm as well as when we started, and Sheila is better. She has come to herself now. Can you find some water? I have a flask here."
"There are fountains all along these drives. We'll run ahead until we come to one of them."
As I spoke, there was a thud behind me, and a quick patter of running feet. The excellent Thomas had taken advantage of my forgetfulness to break for liberty. He was out of sight almost before I turned; and he had been thoughtful enough to throw the revolver away as he jumped.
"I'm a clever idiot," I said ruefully, "your chauffeur has been trying to desert all along, and now he's done it."
"But you were driving, yourself. What difference does it make?"
"I was thinking of what he might say," said I. "But for that matter, I suppose I have got you into a newspaper scrape anyhow, if nothing worse. Every policeman on the East Side must have our number."
"I was just going to ask you about that," said Lady, with a queer little crow in her voice. "Perhaps we had better carry this outside now." She felt about her feet and handed me a muddy strip of metal. "I took this off while you were starting the car. And I put out that red lantern thing, too."
For an instant I forgot Doctor Reid and all the mountain of impossibility that lay between us. She had always been more than other women. And now she was that rarest thing of all, a comrade ready in a moment of need. I reached out my hand, as if she had been a man.