t why worry?" remarked Hood,
scanning the telegrams.

"But why should father lie to me? Why should Constance say she was going
to California if she wasn't?"

"My dear boy, don't ask me such questions!" Hood remarked with an injured
air. "You are guilty of the gravest error in sending telegrams without
consulting me! How can we trust ourselves to Providence if you persist in
sending telegrams! If you do this again, I shall be seriously displeased,
and you mustn't displease Hood. Hood is very ugly in his wrath."

Deering was at the point of tears. Hood was a fool, and he wished to tell
him so, but the words stuck in his throat.

"We move eastward toward the Connecticut border, Cassowary," Hood ordered
and pushed Deering into the machine.

Hood was as merry as the morning itself, and talked ceaselessly as they
rolled through the country, occasionally bidding Cassowary slow down and
give heed to his discourse. The chauffeur listened with a grin, glancing
guardedly at Deering, who stared grimly ahead with an unlighted cigar in
his mouth. He was not to be disturbed in his meditations upon the
blackness of the world by the idiotic prattle of a madman. For half an
hour Hood had been describing his adventures with a Dublin University
man, whose humor he pronounced the keenest and most satisfying he had
ever known. He had gathered from this person an immense fund of lore
relating to Irish superstitions.

"He left me just when I had learned to love him," Hood concluded
mournfully. "Became fascinated with a patent-medicine faker we struck at
a county fair in Indiana. He was so tickled over the way the long-haired
doctor played the banjo and jollied the crowd that he attached himself to
his caravan. That Irishman was one of the most agreeable men to be in
jail with that I ever knew; even hardened murderers would cotton to him.
That spire over there must be Addington. The inn is nothing to boast of,
but we'd better tackle it."

His gayety at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his
destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for
offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of
season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can
was a gross imposition. He cited legal decisions covering such cases and
intimated that he might bring proceedings. As the innkeeper strode
angrily away an elderly woman at a neighboring table addressed the
dining-room on the