feel the tragedy beneath.

Presently they met the first farm-wagon with its load of worshippers for
the little mountain church beyond. As these came out of a small side
road, and caught sight of the car, the bony old horses jibbed and shied,
and took all the driver's skill and a large portion of his vocabulary to
carry them safely past, the children staring, the women pulling their
sunbonnets about their faces and looking down. Something in the sight
brought home to Johnnie the incongruity of her present position. On the
instant, a drop of rain splashed upon the back of her hand.

"There!" she cried in a contrite voice. "I knew mighty well and good
that it was going to rain, and I ought to have named it to you, because
you town folks don't understand the weather as well as we do. I ought
not to have let you come on up here."

"We'll have to turn and run for it," said Stoddard, laughing a little.
"I wish I'd had the hood put on this morning," as he surveyed the narrow
way in which he had to turn. "Is it wider beyond here, do you remember?"

"There's a bluff up about a quarter of a mile that you could run under
and be as dry as if you were in the shed at home," said Johnnie. "This
won't last long. Do you want to try it?"

"You are the pilot," Stoddard declared promptly, resigning the wheel
once more to her hands. "If it's a bad place, you might let me take
the car in."

Rain in the mountains has a trick of coming with the suddenness of an
overturned bucket. Johnnie sent the car ahead at what she considered a
rapid pace, till Stoddard unceremoniously took the wheel from her and
shoved the speed clutch over to the third speed.

"I'm mighty sorry I was so careless and didn't warn you about the rain,"
she declared with shining eyes, as her hair blew back and her colour
rose at the rapid motion. "But this is fine. I believe that if I should
ever be so fortunate as to own an automobile I'd want to fly like this
every minute of the time I was in it."

As she spoke, they swept beneath the overhanging rocks, and a great
curtain of Virginia creeper and trumpet-vine fell behind them, half
screening them from the road, and from the deluge which now broke more
fiercely. For five minutes the world was blotted out in rain, with these
two watching its gray swirls and listening to its insistent drumming,
safe and dry in their cave.

Nothing ripens intimacy so rapidly as a common mishap. Also, two people
seem much to each other a