iciency, but the first movement of the
strained wrist brought a flush of pain to her cheeks. She sat back,
pursing her lips together to restrain an involuntary groan, while the
stranger flashed a second look in her direction. He was a tall, lean,
somewhat cadaverous--looking man, with steel-like eyes shaded by haughty
eyelids, perpetually adroop as though no object on earth were worthy of
his regard. Cornelia took him in in a swift, comprehensive glance, and
with youthful ardour decided that she loathed the creature.

"Hurt yourself?"

"Not a bit, thanks. I guess there's enough of you to do the work
without me, but I'm used to seeing things done in a hurry, and you
seemed pretty deliberate--"

"A little caution is not thrown away sometimes. What induced you to
come out driving alone if you could not manage a horse?"

There being no reply to this question, and the last buckle of the
harness being unstrapped, the speaker turned an inquiring glance over
his shoulder, to behold a rigid figure and a face ablaze with
indignation.

There was something in the girl's face at that moment so vital, so
bizarre and arresting, that so long as Rupert Guest lived, it remained
with him as one of the most striking pictures in his mental picture-
gallery. He had but to pass a high green hedge in the June sunshine, to
catch the fragrance of the honeysuckle and roses, and it rose up before
him again--the white, furious face, with the red, roughened locks, and
the gleam of white teeth through the scarlet lips. There was no
admiration in his thoughts; this was not at all the type of girl whom he
admired, but she was a being by herself, different from anyone whom he
had met. He stared at her with curious attention.

"Do you mean," said Cornelia, in the slow, even tones of intense anger,
"that you think this was my doing--that I upset the cart by my bad
driving? If that's so, you are a little out in your reckoning. If I
hadn't been used to horses all my days we might have been in kingdom
come by this time. I _pulled_ her into the bank before worse things
happened!"

"Then what sent her off in the first instance?"

"A poll parrot, screeching in its cage, set right out in the roadway by
some fool owner, who ought to be had up for murder."

The stranger pursed up his lips in an expressive whistle, then suddenly
sprang upwards as the mare, freed from her harness, rolled on her side
and struggled to her feet, where she stood sh