r and speed each half second. Miss Herron laid her hand
on the driver's arm.

"Not too fast--all at once," she said. "I----"

"She'll do better when we strike the good road," the driver replied.
"This sand checks her badly."

It was so lovely a revenge that lay now in his hand to inflict. This
old lady had towed him home once, the laughingstock of the village;
she had brought to naught at the same time the scheme which had cost
Lucy and himself such a deal of planning. The machine was to be
abandoned, they had arranged in that runaway afternoon when Miss
Herron kept her room; the carriage was to overtake him in his
distress; he was to drive home with the two ladies, holding Lucy's
hand on the back seat, and convincing Miss Herron of his superior
qualifications to marry into her family. But all this had in the
sequel come to less than nothing. It was Miss Herron also who, Archie
was convinced, had been at the bottom of his father's sudden
determination to attach him to the Paris branch of the Fraser
business, and so banish him from all that was dearest and best in the
world.

Now, by blessed good luck, Miss Herron was quite in his power to
frighten soundly and to land at the gathering of the elect, blown,
dusty and disheveled. If he had been more than twenty, he would have
thought and acted otherwise than he did; but the likely outcome of his
plan never troubled the boy, if indeed it entered his honest head at
all. "I'll scare her," remarked Archie, grinning silently, "good and
hard."

But, even as he plotted, he wooed her with his politest phrases;
laughed, but not too loudly, at the little sparkles of wit, accepted
with naive delight her comments on the skill in driving that a boy of
his age could show. For five minutes or so they ran quietly and
steadily along a featureless road through barren pastures. There was
time enough for his plan to blossom, for Oldport was nearly thirty
miles away, and there intervened a village through which to drive at
illegal speed.

But by slow degrees, without at all perceiving how it came about,
Archie found that somehow his passenger was a very delightful old
lady. What had become of the absurd starchiness, which before had so
maddened him, of the stiff pride, which had condescended to him as
though Fraser & Co. were creatures far beneath the regard of a New
England old maid? She asked him questions, she was as interested as
could be in his father's plans for him.

"Where wi