rl in a white
dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.

"I didn't know--" she said, staring from one to the other of us. "Mother
said--that is--won't you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie
down?" She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the
engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.

"No, thanks," said Tish briskly. "I'll just go around to the garage and
oil up while I'm dirty. I've got a short circuit somewhere. Aggie, you
and Lizzie get the trunk off."

Bettina stood by while we unbuckled and lifted down our traveling trunk.
She did not speak a word, beyond asking if we wouldn't wait until the
gardener came. On Tish's saying she had no time to wait, because she
wanted to put kerosene in the cylinders before the engine cooled,
Bettina lapsed into silence and stood by watching us.

Bettina took us upstairs. She had put Drummond's "Natural Law in the
Spiritual World" on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a
knitted slumber robe. Very gently she helped us out of our veils and
dusters and closed the windows for fear of drafts.

"Dear mother is so reckless of drafts," she remarked. "Are you sure you
won't have tea?"

"We had some blackberry cordial with us," Aggie said, "and we all had a
little on the way. We had to change a tire and it made us thirsty."

"Change a tire!"

Aggie had taken off her bonnet and was pinning on the small lace cap she
wears, away from home, to hide where her hair is growing thin. In her
cap Aggie is a sweet-faced woman of almost fifty, rather ethereal. She
pinned on her cap and pulled her crimps down over her forehead.

"Yes," she observed. "A bridge went down with us and one of the nails
spoiled a new tire. I told Miss Carberry the bridge was unsafe, but she
thought, by taking it very fast--"

Bettina went over to Aggie and clutched her arm. "Do you mean to say,"
she quavered, "that you three women went through a bridge--"

"It was a small bridge," I put in, to relieve her mind; "and only a foot
or two of water below. If only the man had not been so disagreeable--"

"Oh," she said, relieved, "you had a man with you!"

"We never take a man with us," Aggie said with dignity. "This one was
fishing under the bridge and he was most ungentlemanly. Quite refused
to help, and tried to get the license number so he could sue us."

"Sue you!"

"He claimed his arm was broken, but I distinctly saw him move