travelling backwards, the car shot into the drive with a spray of gravel and headed toward the house like a thing possessed. Toffee was wildly manipulating the wheel on a hit or miss basis.

"Help!" she screamed.

"Turn right!" Marc yelled from the trellis. "Turn right!"

Automatically, Toffee followed instructions. She grasped the wheel with both hands and pulled to the right. The car swerved, crashed over a flower bed and headed for the lawns. There, pawing turf like a reversed bull, it described a wide circle and started back for the drive.

Toffee waved elatedly to Marc over her shoulder. "Now I've got it!" she cried. "It's easy!" Apparently, she did not realize that she had learned to drive backwards, that there was another way of directing the mechanism.

Racing the car to the area in front of the garage, she whipped it around down the drive again. She looked up at Marc.

"Jump as I come past!" she yelled.

"Who is that?" Julie shrieked, finally recovering her voice. "Answer me! Marc Pillsworth, stay right where you are!"

"Jump!" Toffee yelled. "Now!"

Marc landed on the seat beside Toffee and felt himself borne, as if by the wind itself, down the drive.

The band swung into a booming arrangement of "Don't Give Up The Ship!" as, hind bumper first, they skidded into the street and sped away....

CHAPTER IV

The towers of the Wynant Hotel, a snobbish establishment whose austere front hulked over the general public with stoney aloofness, marked the center of the city.

Within, the Wynant shed upon its cowed clientele all the warmth and home-like comfort of a walk-in freezing unit. The personnel had obviously been trained to regard the paying guest as a fraud, a vandal and a momentary fugitive from social and moral levels so low as to be mainly inhabited by gophers.

As to decor, the Wynant had permitted itself only a single divergence from the completely austere. In the center of its vast foyer there was a fountain and pool, topped with the marble figure of a woman in the final stages of dishabille. The lady in question, however, was of a classic pedigree and, therefore, her condition of undress was 

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