ow perfectly well that I am accustomed to horses," she declared,
moving as if she intended to change places with him.

He looked full down at her, smiling, but he still drove with the air
of one who intends to continue in his present occupation. The black
colts were going at a spanking trot, making nothing of the decided
upward trend of the road. Their shining coats gleamed in the sun;
alertness and power showed in every line of them. They were alive from
the tips of their forward-pointing satin ears to the ends of their
handsome uncropped tails, and they felt their life quiveringly.

"There is no reason in the world why I shouldn't drive," said Miss
Farnsworth, with the pleasantly determined air of a girl who intends
ultimately to have her own way. "If you had not appeared just at the
moment you did, I should have come alone."

"Do you really think you would?" asked Jarvis, studying the left ear
of the nigh horse.

"Certainly. Why not?"

"Because I told Joe not to let you go without me."

She colored under her summer's tan.

"May I ask," she inquired, somewhat stiffly, "why you didn't suggest
to me an hour ago that you wished to get to the station?"

Jarvis smiled at this way of putting it. "Joe was intending to go with
you," he explained.

She looked puzzled.

"Five minutes before you left, Joe came and told me that an accident
had happened to one of his men, and that he couldn't go. He said he
didn't think the colts were safe for you. I've been here only three
days--I don't know anything about them. Joe does."

"Oh--nonsense!" said the girl. "I'm not afraid of them."

"They ran away day before yesterday."

"That makes no difference."

"They are crazily afraid of everything in the shape of a conveyance
run by its own motive power, from a threshing machine to an
automobile."

"That makes no difference, either," declared the young person beside
him with energy. "Not the least in the world."

"Possibly not--to you. It makes an immense difference to me."

She looked away, although the words were said in a matter-of-fact tone
hardly calculated to convey their full importance.

"Since you are here to take the reins away from me when I scream," she
said, with a curling lip, "it is perfect nonsense to refuse to let me
drive. Mr. Jarvis----"

"Put it politely," he warned her, smiling.

"Please change places with me." She said it imperiously.

He looked steadfastly down into her eyes for an instant, u