, fumbled at the
handle and flung open the door to get out.

But he did not get out. He did not get out, because it is dangerous to
jump out of a car when it is going at full speed. And the car was going
at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or
so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the
machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape
like a greyhound. The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped
so grotesque and hopeless a chase. Away in the vanishing distance they
could see the sergeant furiously making notes.

The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite
crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another. Nor did
MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have
stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day. A black dot in the distance
sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again
at the other end. A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt
upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind. Avenues of
poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures
in a zoetrope. Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through
sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their
sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake. Sometimes in an
outlying house a light in one erratic, unexpected window would give them
a nameless hint of the hundred human secrets which they left behind them
with their dust. Sometimes even a slouching rustic would be afoot on
the road and would look after them, as after a flying phantom. But still
MacIan stood up staring at earth and heaven; and still the door he had
flung open flapped loose like a flag. Turnbull, after a few minutes of
dumb amazement, had yielded to the healthiest element in his nature and
gone off into uncontrollable fits of laughter. The girl had not stirred
an inch.

After another half mile that seemed a mere flash, Turnbull leant over
and locked the door. Evan staggered at last into his seat and hid his
throbbing head in his hands; and still the car flew on and its driver
sat inflexible and silent. The moon had already gone down, and the whole
darkness was faintly troubled with twilight and the first movement of
beasts and fowls. It was that mysterious moment when light is coming as
if it were something unknown whose nature one could not guess--a mere
alteration in