lying behind them in the moonlight.
MacIan plucked the struggling and aspiring idiot off the back of the car
like a stray cat, and left him swaying unsteadily in the moon. Then he
approached the front part of the car in a somewhat embarrassed manner
and pulled off his cap.

For some solid seconds the lady and he merely looked at each other, and
MacIan had an irrational feeling of being in a picture hung on a
wall. That is, he was motionless, even lifeless, and yet staringly
significant, like a picture. The white moonlight on the road, when he
was not looking at it, gave him a vision of the road being white with
snow. The motor-car, when he was not looking at it, gave him a rude
impression of a captured coach in the old days of highwaymen. And
he whose whole soul was with the swords and stately manners of the
eighteenth century, he who was a Jacobite risen from the dead, had an
overwhelming sense of being once more in the picture, when he had so
long been out of the picture.

In that short and strong silence he absorbed the lady from head to foot.
He had never really looked at a human being before in his life. He saw
her face and hair first, then that she had long suede gloves; then that
there was a fur cap at the back of her brown hair. He might, perhaps,
be excused for this hungry attention. He had prayed that some sign might
come from heaven; and after an almost savage scrutiny he came to the
conclusion that his one did. The lady's instantaneous arrest of speech
might need more explaining; but she may well have been stunned with
the squalid attack and the abrupt rescue. Yet it was she who remembered
herself first and suddenly called out with self-accusing horror:

"Oh, that poor, poor man!"

They both swung round abruptly and saw that Turnbull, with his recovered
sword under his arm-pit, was already lifting the fallen chauffeur into
the car. He was only stunned and was slowly awakening, feebly waving his
left arm.

The lady in long gloves and the fur cap leapt out and ran rapidly
towards them, only to be reassured by Turnbull, who (unlike many of his
school) really knew a little science when he invoked it to redeem the
world. "He's all right," said he; "he's quite safe. But I'm afraid he
won't be able to drive the car for half an hour or so."

"I can drive the car," said the young woman in the fur cap with stony
practicability.

"Oh, in that case," began MacIan, uneasily; and that paralysing shyness
which is