t polishing with your wedding clothes on, Johnny.
Here's some, thing to take the spots out."

"Oh, Doc!" breathed the boy. "Not to-night, Let me do it--for you--and
her."

The money went back into Burns's pocket, and his hand met Johnny's in
a hearty grasp. "That's better yet," said he, "and thank you, John. If
anybody but you were sending me off I'd ask if everything was surely in
the car But I'll not even ask you."

"You don't need to," vowed the boy proudly. "And there's some things in
you don't need to know about, just extrys in case of breakdown."

"Now, that," said his employer, "is what call proving one's self a
friend."

The Imp went cautiously through the "wet bit," for it lay under the
corner arc-light, and Johnny Caruthers would be watching. But, once on
the open road outside the village, the pace quickened. For late April
the roads were not bad, and if they had been sloughs the Imp Could have
pulled through them. She had a great power hidden away in those six
cylinders of hers, had the Imp.

"You'll not mind if I stop at the hospital as we go through?" questioned
Burns. "Then we'll be off, out the old west road, out of reach of
telephones and summonses of any sort. But I shall be just that much
easier."

"Do stop, please. I'm sure you'll be more satisfied and so shall I."

She sat quietly in the car while he was gone looking up at the lighted
windows and thinking all sorts of sympathetic thoughts concerning those
inside--yet with a tiny fear in her heart that he would find some new
and unavoidable duty to detain him. If he should--

But he was back, and as the Imp's searchlight fell upon his face,
returning, she read there that he was free.

"Doing well, everything satisfactory, and I've not a care in the world,"
he exulted as he leaped in. "Now we're off, and never a stop till we've
put a wide space between us and the rest of them."

The Green Imp ran at its quietest along the city streets, then through
the thinning suburbs, and finally, with the lights all behind them, the
open country ahead, the long, low car came out upon the straight
highway which leads a hundred miles before it comes again to any but
insignificant hamlets and small, rustic inns.

Burns had said little thus far, but as he glanced over his shoulder at
the now distant lights of the city he suddenly spoke low, out of the
quiet:

"We're out of reach of everything and everybody; nobody even knows the
road we're taking. We're