corner and patted at her veil. "It was very good of you to come," she said, "but I knew we could count on you. Here, take this thing—I don't want it." It was a very serviceable revolver, cold and smooth as I slipped it out of its leather holster. I made sure that it was ready for use. "It's perfectly ridiculous taking it along," she added. "We're not going on any desperate midnight errand. The mere time of night is the only thing that's even unconventional. But Walter wouldn't let me come without it."[Pg 96] [Pg 96] I asked no questions. By this time I had learned better; and besides I did not greatly care what we were doing, or what was to happen next. I would be of service if I could, that was all. Since it was to be hopelessly, it might as well be blindly, too; and the sense of adventure was gone out of me. The car swayed and sidled gently to the irregular mutter of the engine and the drowsy whining of the gears. We might almost have been motionless, except when the flare of some passing light swept across us, filling with an uncanny and sudden illumination the polished interior of the limousine, and showing me as by the glimpse of a lightning-flash the veiled and silent figure by my side. Here was romance beyond my wildest imagination: night, and hurry and mysterious need, the swift rush onward through the warm gloom, the womanhood of the breathing shadow so close to me, whose thought I could not know, whose anxiety I could not seek to fathom, whose trouble I could only help by doing ignorantly what she asked of me and then leaving her in other hands. And all this that should have stirred me to chivalry seemed only dull and weary, a thankless task. The lines of The Last Ride Together began running in my mind, and I turned them over and[Pg 97] over, trying vaguely to fill in forgotten phrases, until the rocking of the car reminded me where I was, and the sardonic incongruity of it jarred me back to earth. It was always like that: the deed a parody of the dream, the details of actual happenings making mouths at the truth that lay behind them, life sneering at itself. Here were two lovers hurrying together through the night, held silent by a secret and bound by a blind trust. And they were riding through Westchester in a motor-car, and the thought of a fussy medical man with a bass voice was the naked sword which lay between them. [Pg 97] A trolley car, looking like a huge and luminous caterpillar, hung alongside us
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