ttle
brake; when he pushed his car there was no mark upon him of urgency.
Success without effort! The Gospel of James! Urquhart accepted it as a
commonplace, and sought his gospel elsewhere.

He began to talk without any palpable beginning, and drifted into
reminiscence. "I remember being run away with by a mule train in
Ronda ... the first I had ever handled. They got out of hand--it was a
nasty gorge with a bend in it where you turn on to the bridge. I got
round that with a well-directed stone which caught the off-side leader
exactly at the root of his wicked ear. He had only one ear, so you
couldn't mistake it. He ducked his head and up with his heels. He went
over, and the next pair on top of him. We pulled up, not much the
worse. Well, the point of that story is that the pace of that old
coach and six mokes, I assure you, has always seemed to me faster than
any motor I've ever driven. It was nothing to be compared with it, of
course; but the effort of those six mad animals, the _elan_ of the
thing, the rumbling and swaying about, heeling over that infernal
gorge of stone--! You can't conceive the whirl and rush of it. Now
we're doing fifty, yet you don't know it. Wind-screen: yes, that's
very much; but the concealment of effort is more."

"You've had a life of adventure," she said. "Lancelot may have been
right."

"He wasn't far wrong," Urquhart said. "As a fact, I have never been a
pirate; but I have smuggled tobacco in the Black Sea, and that's as
near as you need go. I excuse myself by saying that it was a long time
ago--twenty years I dare say; that I was young at the time; that I was
very hard up, and that I liked the fun. Lovely country, you know, that
strip of shore. You never saw such oleanders in your life. And sand
like crumbled crystal. We used to land the stuff at midnight, up to
our armpits in water sometimes; and a man would stand up afterwards
shining with phosphorus, like a golden statue. Romantic! No poet could
relate it. They used to cross and recross in the starlight--all the
gleaming figures. Like a ballet done for a Sultan in the Arabian
Nights. I was at that for a couple of years, and then the gunboats got
too sharp for us and the game didn't pay."

She had forgotten her spleen. Her eyes were wide at the enlarging
landscape. "And what did you do next--or what had you done before?
Tell me anything."

"I really don't know what I did before. I went out to the Chersonese
from Naples. I reme