turned and asked sleepily, "What time is it, Francis, please?"

He bent a little as he shot his wrist-watch forward enough to look at
the phosphorescent dial.

"Twenty minutes past three," he said as if it was the most commonplace
hour in the world to be driving through a country road.

For a moment she did not take it in. Then she threw dignity to the
winds. She was rested enough to have some fight in her again.

"I'm going home! I'm going home if I have to walk!" she said wildly.
She started to spring up in the car, with some half-formed intention of
forcing him to stop by jumping out.

"Now, Marjorie, don't act like a movie-heroine," he said
commonplacely--and infuriatingly. He also took one hand off the
steering-wheel and put it around her wrist. "You can't go back to New
York unless I take you. We're fifty miles up New York State, and there
isn't a town near at all."

Marjorie sat still and looked at him. The car went on.

"I don't understand," she said. "You can't be going to abduct me,
Francis?"

Francis, set as his face was, smiled a little at this.

"That isn't the word, because you don't abduct your lawful wife. But I
do want you to try me out before you discard me entirely. And
apparently this is the only way to get you to do it."

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Want the cards on the table?"

She nodded.

"All the cards--now? Or would you rather take things as they come?"

All this time the car was going ahead full speed in the moonlight.

"Everything--now!" she said tensely.

He never looked at her as he talked. His eyes were on the road ahead.

"Just now--as soon as we get to a spot where it seems likely to be
comfortable, we're going to unship a couple of pup-tents from the back
of the car, and sleep out here. I have all your things in the back of
the car. If you'd rather, you can sleep in the car; you're little and
I think you could be comfortable on the back seat."

She interrupted him with a cry of injury.

"My things? Where did you get them?"

"Lucille packed them. She worked like a demon to get everything ready.
She was thrilled."

"Thrilled!" said Marjorie resentfully. "I'm so sick of people being
thrilled I don't know what to do. _I'm_ not thrilled. . . . I might
have known it. It's just the sort of thing Lucille would be crazy over
doing. I suppose she feels as if she were in the middle of a
melodrama."

"I'm sorry, Marjorie, but there's