left Madame in the woods; while if I stayed, he
stayed--and there you had it. And this game went on till dusk, mind
you, and would have gone on longer but for the instinct which came to
me quite suddenly like a thought dropped from the skies: that her
ladyship had given us both the slip, after all, and would be already
where the Baron Albert could not find her. This idea growing to an
unalterable conviction decided me at last. I started my engine,
mounted my box-seat, and without a word to either of them drove
straight away to Brignoles--thence, without a question from any one, to
Paris and my master.

* * * * *

It would have been three months afterwards that I received a letter
from Madame, addressed from the yacht _Mostar_, then in Norwegian
waters. She sent me ten pounds for myself, and after telling me that
she was cruising with Baron Albert and his sister--a piece of news
which fairly took my breath away--she went on to remark that the train
service from Brignoles to Aix is excellent, but that she preferred not
to make the journey in a leather cap and a mackintosh.

So, you see, I guessed in a moment that she had slipped away to
Brignoles while we were talking about her that morning, and just taken
the early express to Aix without a word to anybody. We had been but
three kilometres from the town when the tyre burst, and so the journey
could hardly have fatigued her.

As for her husband, the so-called Count Joseph, I heard in Paris
afterwards that he wasn't her husband at all, but a rich young
Hungarian noble she was trying desperately hard to marry. The Count
Albert had been sent to Monte Carlo by the young man's people to
protect him from this ambitious lady, and right well he appears to have
done the business, for he must have found her in Paris afterwards and
offered her the hospitality of his yacht.

I hope his sister was on board; I do indeed hope so.

But this is a rum world--and Lord, the scandal that some people will
think of makes me quite unhappy sometimes.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Who Drove the Car, by Max Pemberton

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