"Just pack a suit-case for us both. We'll stay one night. I'll take a
bag, too, that I have in my trunk."

It was noon before he returned with a staunch touring car ready for the
trip. He opened the little steamer trunk which he had always kept locked
and took from it a small leather bag. He placed it on the floor, and, in
spite of careful handling, the ring of metal inside could be distinctly
heard.

"What on earth have you got in that queer black bag?" she asked in
surprise.

"Oh, just a lot o' junk from the shop. I thought I might tinker with
it at odd times. I don't want to leave it here. It's got one of my new
models in it."

He carried the bag in his hand, refusing to allow the porter who came
for the suit-case to touch it.

He threw the suit-case in the bottom of the tonneau. The bag he stowed
carefully under the cushions of the rear seat. The moment he placed his
hand on the wheel of the machine, he was at his best. Every trace of the
street gamin fell from him. Again he was the eagle-eyed master of
time and space. The machine answered his touch with more than human
obedience. He knew how to humor its mood. He conserved its power for a
hill with unerring accuracy and threw it over the grades with rarely
a pause to change his speeds. He could turn the sharp curves with such
swift, easy grace that he scarcely caused Mary's body to swerve an inch.
He could sense a rough place in the road and glide over it with velvet
touch.

A tire blew out, five miles up the stream from Asheville, and the easy,
business-like deliberation with which he removed the old and adjusted
the new, was a revelation to Mary of a new phase of his character.

He never once grunted, or swore, or lost his poise, or manifested
the slightest impatience. He set about his task coolly, carefully,
skillfully, and finished it quickly and silently.

His long silences at last began to worry her. An invisible barrier had
reared itself between them. The impression was purely mental--but it was
none the less real and distressing.

There was a look of aloof absorption about him she had never seen
before. At first she attributed it to the dread of meeting his kinsfolk
for the first time, his fear of what they might be like or what they
might think of him.

He answered her questions cheerfully but mechanically. Sometimes he
stared at her in a cold, impersonal way and gave no answer, as if her
questions were an impertinence and she were not of suf