The other girl shrank back.

"Yes—I——"

"Then, why do you not answer him? Surely, if you expected him to write this, you must answer him."

"I will not!" Isabel cried loudly and rebelliously. "I will not go, I will not see him hurt like that and hear him, hear him——" she broke off, fighting for breath. "Tell him to go away. I can't help it now, I can't see him. It's all over!"

This was the woman Allan Gerard had chosen, Flavia thought in bitter wonder; this self-centred, hysterical girl whose love could not survive the marring of her lover's outward beauty. Isabel could not bear to go to him; the irony of it sank deep into the girl who could scarcely bear to stay away. But Flavia turned to the mute Rupert, holding her dignity steadily above her pitiful confusion of mind, striving, also, to ease this blow to Gerard, who was so little fit to receive it.

"Pray inform Mr. Gerard that Miss Rose is unwell and hardly able to answer his letter now," she directed. "I hope she will be able to accompany Mr. Corwin Rose, to-morrow morning, as he suggests."

"No!" Isabel denied.

"I'll report, Miss Rose," Rupert asserted with brevity.

The keen black eyes and the deep-blue ones met, and read each other. Flavia took a step forward and held out her hand.

"It is not probable that we shall meet again, ever. Thank you," she said.

It would not have been possible to bribe Rupert into silence, but Flavia had done better. She knew, and the mechanician knew, as he touched her soft fingers, that he would keep to himself the knowledge that she had elevated to a confidence—the knowledge that she loved Allan Gerard, and was not loved in return.

So it happened that when Rupert returned to the Westbury farmhouse, he literally repeated Flavia's dictated message and contributed nothing of additional information or detail—except that he made one dry comment before retiring for the night.

"There's just one of the Rose family that ain't got any yellow streaks," he volunteered.

"Who?" was asked absently.

The response to his letter had left Gerard paler than usual and very grave. He did not recognize in it the Flavia he knew; the girl who had watched her brother with such rich lavishness of affection, the girl whose most innocent eyes had held the possibilities of all Corrie's ardent young passion without his impulsive faults, and whose warmth of nature had drawn him as a fireside draws a wanderer. He would not doubt her for such slight cause, he would wait for morning and her further answer, but he felt a premonitory dread and discouragement. He had expected so much more than he would now admit to himself. He even had thought vaguely, unreasoningly eager as a wistful boy, that she might come to him with Corrie that evening, that he might see and touch her.

"The lady you didn't write to," answered his mechanician. "Good night."

The next morning Corrie Rose went to the little railway station, alone.



XI

GERARD'S MAN

The hard, glittering macadam track that swept around the huge western factory of the Mercury Automobile Company and curved off behind a mass of autumn-gray woodland, was swarming with dingy, roaring, nakedly bare cars. The spluttering explosions from the unmuffled exhausts, the voices of the testers and their mechanics as they called back and forth, the monotonous tones of the man who distributed numbers for identification and heard reports from his force, all blended into the cheery eight-o'clock din of a commencing work-day. Three brawny, perspiration-streaked young fellows were engaged in loading bags of sand on the stripped cars about to start out, to supply the weight of the missing bodies, and whistling rag-time melodies to enliven their labors.

In the shadow of one of the arched doorways Corrie Rose stood to watch the scene, drawing full, hungry breaths of the gasoline-scented, smoke-murked air. There was more than frost this December morning; ice glinted in the gutters and on the surface of buckets, the healthful lash of the wind flecked color into the men's faces as they pulled on heavy gloves and hooded caps. The spirit of the place was action; the lusty vigor of it tugged with kindred appeal at the inactive, wistful one who looked on.

The heavy throb of the machinery-crowded building smothered the sound of steps; a touch was necessary to arouse the absorbed watcher.

"You've been here for almost a week, Corrie. Don't you feel like getting to work?" queried Gerard's pleasant tones.

The boy swung around eagerly.

"Yes," he welcomed. "Give me something to do, anything."

Gerard nodded, his amber eyes sweeping courtyard and track until, finding the man he sought, he lifted a summoning finger.

"Have someone bring out my six-ninety, Rupert," he called across. "Right away." And to his companion, "Get into some warm things; you will find it cold, driving."

Corrie stiffened, flushing painfully and catching his lip in his white teeth.

"Gerard, you mean me to drive?"

"Of course."

"I shall never drive a car again."

"You will drive the six-ninety Mercury for six hours a day, every day," Gerard corrected explicitly. "Until I get the big special racer built, and then you will drive it. You are going to work into the finest kind of training and drive until you can drive in your sleep. Too bad the winter is shutting in, but that will not stop you any more than it does the testers. In fact, driving in the snow is good practice."

Helpless, Corrie looked at the other man, his violet-blue eyes almost black with repressed feeling.

"Gerard, you must know how I want to; don't ask me! You know how I ache to get ahold of a wheel, but I've forfeited all that."

"You have placed yourself in my factory, under my orders," Gerard stated, with curt finality. "While you are here you will do what I tell you to do, precisely as does every other worker; precisely as does Rupert, for example, who is really tester at the eastern plant and ordinarily works under its master, David French. I have decided to give you a branch of the work that I once planned to do myself and now cannot. Go into the office and put on your driving togs."

"I ain't expecting to shove this ninety through a letter-slot," remonstrated caustic accents from across the busy courtyard. "Move over, girls, you're crowding the aisles! Say, Norris, this ain't a joy-ride down Riverside Drive, it's a testing run; reverse over there and take about six more sachet-bags of mud-pie aboard where your tonneau ain't, before you start. Don't it hurt you bad to hurry like that, you fellows?"

There was a drawing aside by the cars opposite a wide door, and the machine guided by Rupert rolled through, winding a devious course toward where its owner waited. Without a word, Corrie turned and went into the office.

Gerard remained still, following with his gaze the approach of the beloved car he would drive no more, until it came to a halt before him.

"If we're going out, I'll fetch my muff and veils," suggested the mechanician, leaning nearer.

"Thanks, Rupert. I am going with Rose, myself, this first time. You can be ready this afternoon, though."

Rupert's dark face twisted in a grimace, his black eyes narrowed.

"We're laboring under some classy mistake," he dryly signified. "I was inviting myself to go with you. As for Rose, he and I won't perch on the same branch unless we get lynched together for horse stealing—and you know how I don't love a horse."

The amusement underlying Gerard's expression rippled to the surface.

"All right," he acquiesced. "Detail someone else. But, Rupert——"

"Ma'am?"

"I think you will race next spring as Corrie Rose's mechanician."

Their glances encountered, equally cool and determined.

"I'll take in washing with a Chinese partner, if you and Darling French throw me out," assured Rupert kindly. "Don't worry about my future like that."

And he slipped across the levers out of his seat, eel-supple, as Corrie issued from the office.

There was a mile loop of the perfect macadam track circling the factory buildings, then the way ran off into the country roads, inches deep with heavy sand, littered with ugly stones, rising over and pitching down steep grades where holes and mud-patches abounded. Over this the new Mercury cars were driven at top speed, each one reckoning many miles before the makers allowed them to be clothed with bodies and gleaming enamels and to be sent to the purchasers. No flaw escaped unnoticed, no weakness passed. Jaws set under their masks, keen eyes on the road and keen ears listening for the least false note in the tone-harmony of their machines, the sturdy testers drove through a day's work that would have prostrated the average motorist. Out among these men went Corrie Rose, more self-conscious than he had ever been on race track or course.

"I never had a ninety before," he confided to Gerard, as they finished the mile circuit. "A sixty was my biggest. She's, she's a beauty!"

The car slammed violently off the macadam onto the sand road, skidded in a half-circle and righted itself with a writhing jerk.

"Mind your path," cautioned Gerard, in open mirth. "This isn't a motor parkway. Hello!"

One of the smaller cars was coming towards them, limping back to the shops with a broken front spring. The man driving it touched his cap to Gerard as they passed, swinging one arm behind him in a significant gesture and shouting a warning concerning the bridge ahead. Corrie checked his speed, and barely skirted the deep washed-out hole that had caused the other machine's disaster.

"There was rain yesterday and freezing weather last night," Gerard communicated, at his ear. "Now it is beginning to melt again and playing the mischief with the roads. There is a right-angle turn coming."

Corrie nodded, fully occupied. His blood sang through his veins, his fingers gripped the steering-wheel lovingly; he was revelling in the speed exhilaration he had never expected to feel again. The driver who hoped for no such commutation of sentence watched him with quietly sad eyes; eyes in which no one ever was allowed to surprise their present expression, least of all Corrie Rose.

Near noon a tire blew out. Gerard sat on the side of the Mercury and gave bits of ironical advice to the worker while Corrie changed a tire alone for the first time in his life. Corrie bore the teasing sweetly, even when a tool slipped and tore his cold-sensitized fingers.

"I know," he deprecated. "Dean always did it and I just helped. I never did anything thoroughly; an amateur isn't a professional. We would have lost time by that in a road race."

"You will learn. Rupert and I used to do it in two minutes from stop to restart," Gerard returned. "There—gather up your tools; we will go home to luncheon."

"To the factory, first?"

"No. Go slowly and I will show you a short cut."

But Corrie was not in a mood to go slowly, so that they almost missed the driveway that branched from the macadam track to curve around into a park set thickly with fragrant cedars, central in which grove stood the quaintly stiff house of dark brick and stone.

"Run around to the garage," Gerard directed. "Since you will want the car all the time, you might as well keep it here and use the short cut out to the road. I will get out here and go into the house."

Corrie obediently bent to his levers.

"All the time?" he repeated, with an indrawn breath of reluctant ecstasy. "All the time!"

As Gerard turned to the house, a small figure advanced to meet him.

"We've sent out a gang to massage some of the freckles defacing the speedway," Rupert informed him. "Briggs chugged in with a broken spring, Norris side-wiped a fence, and Phillips fell into a hole without publishing a notice, so that his mechanician got off over the bonnet and broke his collar-bone. That ain't testing cars, it's promoting funerals. It's easier to motor into heaven on that road than to drive a camel in New York. What?"

"Yes, have it put in order, of course. I supposed that Mr. Dalton would attend to the matter, since I was out. Rupert, who is the sharpest-tongued, most cross-grained and least ceremonious mechanician we have?"

"I am," was the prompt reply. "Were you wanting me?"

Gerard looked at him and laughed.

"You have ruled yourself off the list of eligibles," he declared. "I want a man to ride with Corrie Rose."

"Oh!" ejaculated Rupert. His malicious, shrewd face gained comprehension. "Oh! Well, I ain't boasting, but I could do that job up pretty fine. Failing me, Devlin is the nastiest thing on the place. You couldn't pat his head without pricking your fingers."

"Very well. Tell him to report to Rose hereafter,—and do not tell him much else. Let all the men know that Rose is training to take my place in the racing work, but do not let them know anything about his millionaire father or his share in the Cup-race affair."

Rupert directed his gaze towards the inert right arm hanging by Gerard's side.

"Your place," he echoed. "Are you giving in without putting up a stiff fight?"

Gerard's chin lifted, his eyes sprang to meet the sharp challenge of the mechanician's.

"No. The fight will soon be on. Are you going to be my second in it?"

"I'm guessing I'll be there when you look for me."

Their eyes dwelt together for a long moment.

"I should like the men to treat Rose as they do each other, so far as possible," Gerard casually resumed his original theme. "It will be good for him. He needs roughing!"

Rupert ran his fingers through his crisp black locks, wheeling to depart.

"He'll slip control and run wild," he predicted, grimly vicious. "He needs the training you're planning for him, all right, but he ain't got the stuff in him to stand it. He'll slip control—here's hoping he smashes himself this time!"

Gerard moved his head in disagreement.

"Wait," he advised. "You once said he could not last out a certain twenty-four-hour race."

"He didn't."

"He finished in third place."

"Because you helped him through, that's why. He didn't have to do it alone."

"He doesn't have to do this alone, either," reminded Gerard.

Rupert looked at him, then walked away, every line of his body reiterating the prediction he could not sustain argumentatively.

It was half an hour later that Corrie came into the room to join his host, carrying a letter in his hand.

"It is from Flavia," he volunteered. "She promised to write as soon as they got across, but she did better; she wrote this on board the steamer so that it was all ready to send." He sat down in his place and rested his arms on the table in the boyish attitude so associated with the massively rich dining-room of his father's house and the light-hearted group who had gathered there. "It was like her to do better than her word,—she doesn't know how to do less. One, one can tie up to her."

Gerard continued to gaze out the window opposite, his expression setting as if under a sudden exertion of self-control.

"I—well, I was always fond of my sister, but one learns a good deal more of people when things go wrong than when they just run along right. She asks me about you, how you are now."

"Miss Rose is too kind."

Some quality in the brief acknowledgment compelled a pause. The once self-assertive Corrie had become acutely sensitive to any suggestion of rebuff or disapproval. He could not in any way divine this rebuke was not for him, or know of the bruise he innocently had touched.

When the first course of the luncheon was served, Gerard came over to his seat and opened a new subject with his usual kindness of manner. It was a curious fact that, although Gerard had felt the awakening of love for Flavia Rose from his first glimpse of her, he never had aided Corrie for his sister's sake. Even when he had dragged himself from the overwhelming blackness of pain and the numbing effects of anaesthetics to defend the driver whose foul blow had struck him down, it was of Corrie alone he thought, not of Flavia, Corrie whom he had shielded from disgrace and open punishment. Man to man they had dealt together, no woman, however dear, entered between them. So when Flavia had seemed to fail her lover, again the separateness had held and Gerard never even imagined visiting her desertion on her brother. He had not resented Corrie's natural speech of her, now, but he could not listen to it; not yet.

"You will find your regular mechanician waiting for you when you go out again," he observed. "You can learn much with him, if you choose, Corrie, although he is no Rupert. Take your machine where and how you please; it is all practice. I will see you again at dinner, unless you grow tired before then and would like to come up to the draughting-room to meet my chief engineer and designer."

Corrie looked down, crumpling a fold of the table cloth between nervous fingers.

"Gerard, do they know?" he asked, his voice low. "I mean, how you were hurt and what Rupert accuses me of?"

"Certainly not. You are no one to them but my new driver."

A still ruddier color tinged the young face, the fair head bent a little lower.

"That is all I want to be, ever. Thank you, Gerard; I'll make good."



XII

THE MAKING GOOD

Corrie did not slip control during the weeks that followed. There was no running wild to record. At first he used to come in from his driving reddened by more than the cold wind, and there were rumors current of certain vigorous word-duels between him and his sullen assistant, Devlin. But he never complained to Gerard or exhibited any smart of excoriated vanity. The testers accepted him as a little more than their equal, after watching him drive, and he gladly met their comradeship with his own. It was very easy to like Corrie; soon he was surrounded by friends.

Only Jack Rupert never spoke to him. The thing was not done obtrusively, but it was done. He never openly slighted Corrie Rose or showed him discourtesy, he simply failed to come in contact with him. And Corrie tacitly accepted the situation, avoiding the inflexible mechanician, on his part. So winter shut in, with blizzards that frequently drove everyone off the roads until snow-ploughs and shovels had accomplished their work. Then Gerard would summon Corrie to the inside of the huge, reverberant factory, where amid its lesser brothers the Titan racing machine was slowly growing to completion; the Titan of Gerard's past speed-visions, the dream-planned car that was now for another's control. He taught, and Corrie learned hungrily.

It was in February Corrie first noticed that Gerard and Rupert simultaneously disappeared for an hour and a half every morning. No one knew why, or had interested enough to speculate, it seemed. Gerard always sent Corrie off on some duty, at that time each day, and only accidental circumstances awoke the young driver's attention to a custom without an explanation.

Of course, Corrie asked no questions. He was not temperamentally curious and he was well-bred. But, returning unexpectedly to the house, one morning in early March, he passed Rupert going out and realized himself encroaching on the tacitly established period of retirement. Sobered, half-doubtful of his course, he ran up the stairs, and in the upper hall came suddenly upon Gerard leaning against the wall.

"Gerard!" Corrie exclaimed; goggles and gloves fell to the floor as he sprang to his friend. "Gerard, you're ill? Let me help you—lean on me! I'm strong enough to carry you."

"It is nothing," Gerard panted. "I tried to come after Rupert in too much of a hurry, that's all. I remembered something I had forgotten to tell him. What are you doing here? I sent you out."

Once Corrie would have flashed hot retort to a reproof certainly undeserved, not now.

"I am sorry; I didn't understand," he apologized. "You never said I must stay out. Let me help you, get you something."

"I know; I'm unreasonable!" Gerard straightened himself. "Never mind me, Corrie; I am all right now."

He was white with a singular pallor that Corrie was too inexperienced to recognize, but he smiled reassurance to his assistant and himself led the way to the room opposite.

"There is some dose in the glass on the table," he indicated, finding a chair. "I might drink it, if I had it here. And, don't you want to get me a cigarette?"

In silence Corrie complied with the requests. Beside the slight, colorless Gerard, he radiated vigorous health and that scintillant freshness drawn from days passed in sunlight and sweet air, but his eyes at this moment held a desperate anxiety and unrest that left the advantage of contrast to his companion's clear tranquillity of regard.

"You are getting worse," he declared abruptly. "There is no use of trying to spare my feelings, Gerard; instead of gaining, you are losing strength."

"I beg your pardon; I am getting better," Gerard corrected with perfect assurance. He put aside his glass and leaned back in his chair. "You do not in the least know what you are talking about. Since you are here, we might get a bit of business done that I had meant to leave until you came in to luncheon. You understand that the formalities must be preserved; are you willing to sign one of our regular driver's contracts, to drive for the Mercury Company this year, and for no one else?"

"I will do," said Corrie, "whatever you want. Is this the paper?"

He took up a pen and, still standing, wrote his name across the foot of the document, the other man's attentive gaze following his movements.

"Is that the way you sign legal papers, Corrie, without reading them?"

The blue eyes gave the questioner one expressive glance.

"You gave it to me," was the answer.

Gerard contemplated him, then drew another printed sheet from a pile on the desk and pushed it across.

"All right. I want you to sign this, too," he signified.

As carelessly as before, Corrie set down his signature and turned away from the half-folded page.

"I came back early because I had a letter from Flavia," he explained. "I wanted to answer it right away. She says that father doesn't intend to come home until autumn. I don't believe she likes it much, but of course she wouldn't tell him so. He has enough to stand."

Gerard drew the two papers towards him and put them into a drawer. It is hard to be consistent; the temptation of seeing Corrie read Flavia's weekly letters had long since vanquished the resolution of the man whose love for her seemed to himself to illustrate that the economies of Nature do not include human passion. Corrie found a willing, if mute, listener to all confidences in regard to his sister.

"She has never told Mr. Rose that you are with me?" Gerard asked, to-day.

"No," he responded, surprised. "Oh no! She promised me that, the night before I left home."

"Yet, living so close in thought with your father as she does, I should have fancied——"

"That she couldn't help telling him? I don't know who started that story that women can't keep secrets." Corrie laughed mirthlessly. "From what I have seen, they can keep quiet a secret that would tear itself out of any man I ever met, if the wrench killed him."

He unclasped the heavy fur coat he still wore and pushed it aside from his throat with an impatient air of oppression.

"But Flavia could not hurt anyone, and she knows that would hurt me," he added, more gently.

Flavia could not hurt anyone. Allan Gerard considered that statement, not so much in bitterness as in a wonder that made all life uncertain. He recalled the fountain arcade of rose-colored columns and delicate lights, the sweetly demure girl who waited there for her brother, and her last brief glance of virginal candor and innocently unconscious confession. Flavia could not hurt anyone. Yet she had dismissed the man who loved her, without even granting him the poor alms of courteous sympathy, had left him to learn her decision from her silence. Long since, he had decided that he had been condemned as the cause of her beloved brother's downfall, and now he again excused her hardness to himself as a result of her over-tenderness for Corrie. Either that, or he himself had somehow failed, in some way had been found lacking.

He never did Flavia Rose so much wrong as to suppose her affected by the physical injury he had suffered. If she had loved him, no such change could have come between them. He knew that no marring of her beauty would have had effect upon his steadfast love for her, and he rated her far above himself in all good things.

It was quite a quarter-hour before Gerard looked up and saw that Corrie had remained standing by the table in an abstraction complete as his own, lips pressed shut and straight brows contracted. Startled out of self-contemplation, the older man leaned forward to give his aid to a moment whose bitterness he divined.

"Corrie, take off your furs and come to luncheon," he directed, crisply energetic. "You have got to take out the Titan for its first run, this afternoon."

Effectively aroused, Corrie swung around.

"The Titan?" he echoed. "To-day?"

"Yes. Come on."

In the thin, clear March sunshine, two hours later, the Mercury Titan rolled out onto the mile track, shaking earth and air with its roar and vibrant clamor. The force of testers and factory operatives crowded about, busy men found time to cluster at the buildings' doors and windows in keen interest.

Opposite Gerard and his little staff, the men who had designed and evoked the winged monster, Corrie Rose was in his seat, flushed with excitement, but collected and at home in the powerful machine which he was to be the first to test and master. "Until you give it to its racing driver, let no one except me take it?" he had begged of Gerard. And Gerard had given the promise, smiling oddly.

But if Corrie was eager for the start, his mechanician palpably was not. The place beside the driver remained vacant until the last moment, when the reluctant Devlin slowly climbed into it.

"Devlin is nervous," Gerard gravely commented, to his own one-time mechanician. "He is a very good factory man, but this is too big work for him. If they were going on a longer trip, I should not like to send Corrie out with him."

"I ain't denying anything," snapped Rupert, scowling after the departing car as it leaped for the open track like an animal unleashed.

That first afternoon's trial of the Mercury Titan proved it much faster than either the track or road would stand. Also, Corrie Rose was proved fully capable of handling his wheeled projectile. When he came in, at dusk, the testers regarded him with unconcealed respect; there was genuine admiration mingled with the congratulations offered him by the car's designers. He had become, after Gerard, the most conspicuous man in the great automobile plant.

Devlin crawled out of his seat and complained of nausea.

On the third day of practice, when Corrie brought the car back to the factory at noon, Rupert suddenly walked up to him and broke the silence of months.

"What's the matter with your fifth cylinder?" he demanded.

Amazed, Corrie slipped off his mask and turned his fatigued face to the questioner.

"I couldn't help it," he deprecated, quite humbly. "Devlin was too busy holding on to do much, and I was driving."

Rupert darted a glance of blighting contempt at the sullen Devlin, and walked away.

Gerard had not seen the episode, nor did it reach his ears. But he was chatting with Corrie, late on the same afternoon, when Rupert emerged from the factory and thrust an overcoat at the young driver who stood beside his car.

"I ain't hanging out a diploma," he stated acridly, "but this ain't summer by some months and you're qualifying for a hospital—which I don't guess is what you were brought here for."

"Thank you," faltered Corrie, and wonderingly put on the garment.

Gerard continued to survey the machine before him, not a flicker crossing his expression or betraying consciousness of any unusual event. Rupert's swift look of blended defiance and embarrassment directed towards his chief glided off an impenetrable surface.

Corrie followed with wistful eyes the mechanician's return to the building.

"I knew a West Point fellow, once, who had been given the 'silence' treatment—I used to wonder why he minded so much," he laughed, apropos of nothing, but his voice caught.

It was the first time Corrie had ever admitted knowledge of Rupert's ostracism of him, or revealed how deeply the hurt had been felt. Gerard laid a caressing hand on his shoulder, wisely saying nothing. After a moment Corrie grasped the Titan's steering-wheel and swung himself into his seat behind it, but paused before summoning Devlin to start the motor, and rewarded Gerard's tact by another impulsive confidence, spoken just audibly:

"I miss my father all the time. I think I always will. And I would miss him most if he came home and I had to live along side of him. He—well, he stays in Europe. I'll put up the car for the night, if you're ready to have me; it's getting pretty dark to run any more."

"The car is in your hands; put it where you please, when you please," responded Gerard; that mark of trust seemed the only comfort he could offer, then; he was too fine not to ignore the other issues.



XIII

THE TITAN'S DRIVER

There was a letter for Corrie in the evening mail, next day. At least, there was an envelope containing a gaudy picture-postal. It was at this last that Corrie was gazing, when Gerard came to remind him that dinner waited, and of it he first spoke.

"It's from Isabel. I—she need not have sent it!" He abruptly pushed the card across the table toward Gerard and turned away to complete his preparations.

"A postal?"

"Oh, yes. She used to be fond of writing long letters, but she has quit the habit. Flavia tells me she has not received but three postal-cards from Isabel since they parted, although they used to be such chums."

"I am to read?"

"If you like."

The red and green landscape represented, libellously, the Natural Bridge of Virginia. Across the glazed surface ran a few blurred lines of script:

"Dear Corrie: May I marry someone else, if I want to, or do you say not? I.R."

Gerard laid down the card and regarded, troubled, his companion's straight shoulders and the back of his erect head, the only view afforded as Corrie stood before his mirror employing a pair of military brushes upon his unruly blond hair.

"I did not know that the affair—that matters were so far arranged between you and your cousin," he said.

He spoke with hesitation, uncertain of how to venture upon a subject never before broached between them, yet feeling speech tacitly invited. In the stress of his own suffering at the time following the accident, preoccupied by the witnessing of Corrie's hard punishment of dishonor and grief and his struggle to fall no lower under it, he had forgotten that the boy-man also had to bear the loss of the girl upon whom he had spent his first love. For it required no deep insight to recognize that Isabel Rose was not the type of woman who is a refuge in time of disaster.

But the embarrassment was his alone; Corrie answered without confusion:

"We were engaged, yes. But that is ended. She had no need to write. She might have known, or have taken it for granted."

Gerard studied the view presented of his companion, striving to draw some conclusion from pose or tone. He had no mind to have his work of months marred and his driver distracted by an interlude of useless sentimentality; the temptation to congratulate Corrie upon his freedom from an unsuitable marriage was almost too strong. But what he actually said was quite different, and escaped from his lips without consideration of its effect.

"I should not have supposed your cousin had so fine and strict a sense of honor."

The oval brush slipped through Corrie's fingers and fell to the floor, rolling jerkily away with the light glinting on its silver mounting in a series of heliographic flashes. The owner stooped to recover it, groping for the conspicuous object as if the room were dark instead of flooded with the brightness of late afternoon.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "What did you say? Her sense of honor——?"

"I beg your pardon," Gerard promptly apologized, aware of worse than indiscretion. "I, really, Corrie, I hardly realized what I was saying. Certainly I did not mean that the way it sounded. I only intended to say——"

What had he intended to say? What could he substitute for the spoken truth that would not wound the hearer either for himself or for the girl he loved?

"I only meant," he recommenced, "that her asking your formal release showed a careful punctiliousness not common."

Corrie had recovered his brush, now. He laid it on the chiffonier before answering.

"How do we know what is common? What is honor, anyway; what other people see or what you are? I fancy she wouldn't have written if she hadn't been sure of what I'd say," he retorted, with the first cynicism Gerard ever had seen in him. "She likes me to take the responsibility, that's about all. Well, I've done it. Did you say I was keeping dinner waiting?"

This of the once-adored Isabel! However much relief the older man felt, there came with it a sensation of shock and regret. Had Corrie lost so much of his youth, unsuspected by his daily companion? Where were the old illusions which should have blurred this sharp judgment? He made some brief reply, and presently they went downstairs.

The dinner was rather a silent affair.

"Do you want to drive me into town?" Gerard inquired, at its conclusion. "I find that I must see Carruthers before he leaves for the East, and he is stopping at the Hotel Marion. If you are tired, I will get my chauffeur."

"I should like it," Corrie exclaimed, rising eagerly. "I'll get the car. Your car?"

"I should think so. I am not exactly anxious to drive into town with your racing machine, although we have got to make fair time in order to catch him before his train leaves."

Corrie laughed, turning away.

"I'll make the time, all right," he promised. "Your roadster isn't so pretty slow, considering. I'll be at the door in three minutes."

He was, driving hatless and without a motor-mask in the fresh spring air.

"No overcoat?" Gerard disapproved. "What would Rupert say?"

Corrie flushed like a complimented girl; that the mechanician should have admitted him to any intercourse, however cold and slight, moved him so deeply that even Gerard's allusion was too much.

"I have it with me; I don't need it," he evaded hurriedly. "Ready?"

"Ready."

The car sprang forward.

The yellow country road merged into macadam, the macadam into asphalt. They were in the city, presently, slowly rolling through streets filled with playing children who garnered the last daylight moments. On one corner a hand-organ was performing, and the group disporting itself to the flat, tinkling music broke apart to shout after the car, waving grimy hands.

"Hello, Mr. Corrie!" one shrill voice came to the motorists.

The driver lifted his hand in salute, glancing at his companion with a blended mischief and diffidence so delightful, so much like the old merry Corrie Rose, that Gerard laughed in sheer sympathy of pleasure.

"They seem to know you, Corrie?"

"They do. At least, what they call knowing me. You see, I blew out a tire here, on the way home after you sent me in to the postoffice, last week, and about three dozen kiddies gathered around to watch me change it. Bully little frogs; they nearly lost all the kit of tools trying to help me. And talk! So I—well, I gave them all a spin about the square, in blocks of as many as could hang on at a time, and I set up the ice creams all around. It seemed my treat. You don't mind? I suppose they are full of germs and want washing, but I just remembered they were kids."

"I certainly do not mind," Gerard assured. He wanted to say something more, but found his thoughts singularly inarticulate. There was a certain verse commencing with "Inasmuch——" that he would have quoted to Corrie, had they been of any blood but the reticent Saxon. "They remembered part of your name," he added instead.

"That was all I told them. The Hotel Marion?"

"Yes. Speed up all you dare, our time is short."

The time was indeed short. As they came down the avenue, Gerard uttered an exclamation, catching sight of a man who descended the hotel steps toward a carriage.

"Cross the street! There he goes. Quick, or we'll lose him! Cross over."

He was promptly obeyed. The car shot across the street regardless of traffic rules, and was brought shuddering to a halt beside the left-hand curb. Gerard sprang out and went to join the man who had stopped beside the carriage to wait for his pursuer.

Left in the car, Corrie took a leisurely survey of the street, preparatory to withdrawing from his illegal situation. But it was already too late. Even while he looked, a blue-garbed figure appeared around a corner, perceived the south-bound automobile beside the east curb and marched upon the offender.

To some temperaments there is an undeniable exhilaration in conflict. Corrie puckered his lips to a soundless whistle, settled back in his seat, and waited.

"What are you doing over here?" the officer challenged, arriving. "Don't you know how to drive? You're under arrest."

"What for?" Corrie asked unmoved.

"What for? How did you get a chauffeur's license? For driving on the wrong side of the street, of course."

"I'm not driving."

"Don't be funny, young fellow! For stopping on the wrong side, if you like it better, then."

"I'm not stopping."

"You——?"

"I am stopped. You did not see me do it. I might have come out of one of those buildings, or have come up on one of those sidewalk elevators, for all you know. You can't arrest me for something you didn't see me do, man. You wouldn't if you could; I can see you have a sweet disposition."

The officer stared, and took a more careful survey of his antagonist.

"You're no chauffeur, I guess," he pronounced dryly.

"Well, I've got a license."

"That may be. Anyway, chauffeur or college student, you can't stay here with that machine."

"You want me to leave? Certainly, officer, I always obey the law. Here comes my friend; I'll go now."

The policeman's face relaxed into a sour smile, the nonsense snaring him into unwilling participation.

"Do," he recommended. "The minute your wheels move, you will be driving on the wrong side of the street and I will pull you in."

"When I drive on the wrong side of the street, go ahead and do it. Are you ready to start, Gerard?"

Gerard, who had come up in time to hear enough, had interpretation been necessary, put an additional argument into the man's hand before entering the car.

"My fault, Johnston," he stated, with the quiet serenity of one certain of his ground. "You know I am not a law-breaker, I fancy; this was a case of necessity."

"It was your friend, Mr. Gerard——"

Corrie reached for a lever, smiling ingenuously across as he interrupted to reply.

"The rule says to keep to the right, officer?"

"Sure."

"Well, I am left-handed, that's all. Now look at this."

This was the execution of a movement that sent the automobile rolling backwards.

"You see, I go north on the east side," the driver called, while the machine slid away. "All right, yes? Nothing in the rules about which end first you drive your car? No? I thought not. Good-by."

The car was at the corner, rounded it, and darted away in the customary method of straightforward progression.

"But if this had been New York, I would be in jail," Corrie added placid commentary, when security was attained. "I know all about it; I was arrested in Manhattan, once, for driving without a license number displayed. The cords must have broken and have let the number-plate fall off. Much that policeman listened to me. He ordered Dean into the tonneau with Flavia, stepped up into the seat beside me and ordered me to drive to the nearest police station."

"What did you do?"

"I drove. It cost me twenty-five dollars, a week later, and I had to 'phone for the family lawyer with bail to keep me from spending that night in a cell. Father——"

The stop was full. Gerard turned his attention to the street traffic, giving his companion liberty to evade continuing the theme. The evasion was not made.

"Father," Corrie resumed, clearly and steadily, "gave me this diamond I wear, when I told him, so that I might always have something with me to give as a bond for reappearance instead of having to be locked up until I got help. He said one might be caught without one's pocketbook along, but not without one's ring. I have never taken it off since."

There was a change in his tone that Gerard had heard before, and never had succeeded in analyzing; not the change from gayety to gravity, although that was present, but some more subtle alteration that stirred the hearer to a strange, illogical sense of discomfort and failure on his own part. The feeling was transient and most unreasonable; common-sense swept it aside almost as it was formed. He said nothing, nor did his companion speak again.

The sunset glow and color were gone, but the delicate after-light still remained as a luminous presence in the land when the automobile entered the boundaries of the Mercury Company's property. There was a gate before the private road to Allan Gerard's house. When Corrie halted the car there and descended to open the way, a ragged, unsavory figure rose from the grass before him.

"I'll open it, mister," the man volunteered. "Never mind it," as Corrie felt in his pocket for coin. "I want more than that. Forgotten me, have you?"

Astonished, Corrie scrutinized him, seeking the recollection implied.

"You're the man in the Dear Me!" he identified suddenly. "The man I threw overboard."

"Ah! You're it." He drew nearer, blinking intelligence. "I served you a square turn for your grub and clothes, too. Get rid of your friend; you an' me has got to talk."

Before the bearing of confident familiarity, the unclean personality and significant smile, Corrie slowly stiffened in rigid distaste.

"What do you want to say to me?" he demanded curtly. "What do you mean by serving me a square turn? Speak out. There is nothing concerning me that my friend doesn't already know."

The man projected his unshaven chin, cunningly interrogative. The intervening months had altered him, not pleasantly. The tramp of the Dear Me had been unattractive; this man was repellent.

"Is he on to what happened on the day before the last Cup race? Given him the inside story of that, have you? Or was he there?"

The pause was not noticeably long.

"He is Allan Gerard," said Corrie, his voice suppressed. "Say what you wish."

"I saw you ridin' past without a hat on, a while ago, an' I knew you. Want? I want you to stand somethin' for me to live on, Mr. Rose, you bein' a millionaire. I was on the spot after the smash an' heard the talk an' saw your wrench picked up. You'd treated me right, so I just lifted a bunch of tools from one of the machines standin' empty, an' sprinkled them around that twelve-mile race track. The newspaper fellows found the things, too, an' kind of thought less of findin' the one where you smashed Mr. Gerard. One fellow help another, eh? No use of goin' to Sing Sing, neither."

Corrie's movement was swiftly accurate and uncalculated as the leap of some enraged primitive creature. His ungloved fist struck with an impact sounding like the slap of an open hand, and flung the man crashing through the hedge of lilac-bushes to roll over and over on the ground, clutching blindly at the turf strewn with broken leaf-buds.

"Corrie!" Gerard cried stern warning, too late, starting from his seat.

Corrie swung about, his blue eyes blazing in his flushed face, his lips parted in a scarlet line across the white gleam of his set teeth.

"If he comes near me again, I'll kill him!" he panted savagely.

"It seems to me you have done enough of that sort of thing, already," Gerard retorted, equally angered.

The biting reminder was not premeditated; it leaped out of brief wrath and all the aching memories stirred by the episode. But it was none the less effective. Gerard himself did not realize how effective until he saw all the color and animation wiped from the young face and saw Corrie put his hand across his eyes.

"Corrie!" he exclaimed, cut deeply by his own cruelty, amazedly furious with himself. "Corrie——"

Corrie had turned his back to him, not in offence, but as a woman would cover her face. He answered without moving.

"It's—all right. I understand; it is—all right."

Gerard left the car, more humiliated in his own sight than he ever had been in his life. For the moment his own lack of self-control loomed larger than Corrie's, past or present.

"Corrie, I said what I did not mean," he appealed, laying his hand on the other's shoulder. "Forgive me. Don't take it like this!"

Corrie slowly turned to him.

"There isn't anything you can say to me, that I can complain of," he checked apology, quietly serious. "It is all right, of course. I—no one can understand just what it was like to hear him talk that way to me, no one can, ever. But I should not have struck him."

The expression in his eyes as they encountered Gerard's was not of remorse or shame, or resentment, was not any mingling of these, but simply of utter loneliness patiently accepted. Gerard stood back in silence, helplessly aware of having inflicted a hurt no contrition could heal.

The man was sitting up, dazed and bruised, his stupid gaze following his assailant. To him Corrie went, dragging forth a handful of paper money.

"Keep away from me," the victor cautioned with harsh dislike. "I mean it. Here, take this and go. I'm giving it to you because I knocked you down and not because of anything you claim, understand."

The man grasped the money eagerly, peering up with more admiration than sullenness.

"You've got a good punch, mister," he conceded. "I'll get out. I wouldn't have come, only I thought you'd really done what they said, that time."

Corrie drew back sharply, staring at the other. His right hand was cut and bleeding from the blow he had dealt, red drops trickled and fell as he stood, but he did not seem aware of the fact, either then or when he turned away to take his place at the steering-wheel. Gerard took the seat beside him without comment; he fancied he could imagine very exactly what Corrie Rose, gentleman, was enduring.

But whatever Corrie had to endure then or at any time, he was quite masculine enough to hurry it out of sight. At the house, he turned to Gerard his usual matter-of-fact glance.

"I will put the car in the garage and go over to the factory for a while," he said. "Mr. Edwards was going to examine that throttle which jarred open—on the Titan, I mean—so it would be ready for me to start early to-morrow. I told him I would be over, this evening."

"As you like. But do not stay too long; the house is lonely without you. And, do something for that cut hand, Corrie, or it may make you trouble."

They looked at each other.

"Thank you," acknowledged the younger.

The Titan was ready next morning, as due, and the early start was made.

The great machine had run for several days without especial incident, but this morning Devlin's nervous incompetency manifested itself in a new direction. He forgot to fill the oil-tank of the car he served as mechanician, before Corrie took it out. One of the testers drove into the busy courtyard, about ten o'clock, shouting the information that the Titan was stuck eight miles out on the back road and Rose wanted the emergency car to bring him oil.

Sardonic of eye, caustic of tongue, Rupert himself attended to the carrying out of the request and watched the rescuing car depart on its mission. Half an hour later the Titan rolled past, missing fire and running with a sound like a sick gatling gun. Bare-headed and without his mask, Corrie was driving with one hand and striving to aid his mechanician's efforts with the other, as they swept around the mile track. In gritting exasperation Rupert stared after them, then snatched up a red flag and ran to the edge of the road.

Gerard, notified of trouble with the big car, arrived from his office in time to see the Titan halt, flagged, and the lightning strike Devlin.

"Get out," snarled Rupert, his dark face black with scorn, swinging one small arm in a wide gesture. "I ain't had any explanation of what you're doing behind anything except a baby-carriage, and I don't want it. Get out and don't come back. Quick!"

Dazed, Devlin obeyed. Rupert dragged open the motor's hood, busied himself for thirty seconds and crashed the metal cover shut again. As he flung himself into the seat beside the stupefied Corrie, he first caught sight of Gerard standing on the stone portal.

"Better send someone to hold down the yard," he sharply advised. "I ain't going to be there. What?"

Corrie had sufficient presence of tact to send the car forward without pause or comment, not daring to look at his new companion. But he gathered a jumbled view of Gerard's mirthful face and of Devlin standing sulkily at bay before his grinning mates.

When the Mercury Titan returned from its morning's work, it was running with the velvet purr of a happy tiger, the flames from its exhausts shimmered in the violet tints of perfect mixture, and the indicating dial pointed to the fact that Corrie had found some stretch of road where he had passed the hundred mile an hour gait.

"She's in exact shape," approved Gerard, who had come out to meet them. "Good work, Rupert."

Rupert turned a hard dark eye upon him.

"I ain't pining for this," he signified measuredly. "But there's something coming to any decent car, and this one's suffered cruel."

Gerard nodded.

"I have been wondering where I could find a mechanician fit to race with Corrie this season," he confided, nonchalantly serene.

The double bombshell dealt full effect.

"Well, rest yourself," urged Rupert tartly, leaving his seat. "I'll do it. I know I'm a liar, I guess, but that won't hurt my work none."

"Race?" gasped Corrie. "Race? I!"

One rebel vanquished utterly, Gerard surveyed the other, preparing for his first conflict with the new Corrie Rose he had himself created; the Corrie Rose who in his twentieth year was a full-grown man.

"I have had you and the car entered for the Indianapolis meet, next month," he announced; "after that we are going to Georgia, then down to try the sea-beach along the Florida shore, where you can let out all the speed the machine has got. Of course you will race. What else have you been training for?"

Corrie's full red lips closed, his blue eyes braved Gerard's.

"I will not. Gerard, I cannot. To go back as the millionaire amateur of the pink car, to stand the toleration of the professional drivers, who cannot really handle their machines better than I can mine, to know that the story of how you were wrecked is being whispered after me—I'm not big enough to face it all! I might be challenged and sent off the track, for all I know."

"You will not go back as an amateur," Gerard corrected. "You are entered and registered as a professional automobile racer, enrolled on the books of the A.M.A., under their protection and subject to their rules and authority for the future. You will find your certificate of the fact lying on your table. Yes, I did it without consulting you. You signed the necessary papers yourself, without reading them, and you cannot undo this without a formal resignation—unless you contrive to get yourself suspended."

Corrie's fingers gripped the wheel, the varying expressions changing his face like storm-swept water, while the hunger of his gaze besought Gerard.

"You—it's true? Gerard, you've done that for me? They, the A.M.A. officers, they accepted me?"

"Yes. Once for all, there are no whispers connecting you with my accident. That matter is dead. You go back to the racing as a recognized driver in the employ of the Mercury Company, I acting as your manager and Jack Rupert as your mechanician. Do you think it probable that anyone would credit the idea of trouble between us, Corrie?"

"Give me a moment, or I'll lose the only honor I've kept," said Corrie Rose, and turned away his face. "I shall do whatever you bid me, of course."



XIV

VAL DE ROSAS

On the day that Corrie in his American home consented to drive the Mercury Titan through the racing season, Flavia and Mr. Rose arrived at the tiny Spanish village of Val de Rosas—arrived, not so much through design as through the bursting of a tire on their motor car.

"It seems as if the name of the place might be one of our lost titles," observed Mr. Rose idly. "And there is the castle to match, on the hillside. Come stroll through the town, my girl, while Lenoir repairs damages."

Smiling, Flavia stepped down beside him, throwing back her silk veils and lifting her fair, almost too delicate face to the Andalusian sunshine. After her stepped a great dog, with the sedate, matter-of-course bearing of a constant attendant.

"I wonder who lives in the castle," she responded to his mood of playfulness. "Our castle. We should dispossess them."

"Lets," proposed her father.

There was an inn in the village, kept by a ravishingly plump landlord of sixty who wore a short velvet jacket. He informed the travellers that the diminutive white castle was not only vacant, but to let, being the property of a mad Englishman who had bought it to live in while writing a book, and having finished the book had departed. Mr. Rose regarded his daughter speculatively.

"We have been going from one place to another for five months, and we have got to put in six more," he said with brief decisiveness. "I mean to stay on this side of the water until fall. Do you want to try living here for a while, or would you rather keep moving?"

"Let us stay here," Flavia voted eagerly. "Dear, I am so tired of hotels."

Mr. Rose studied her as she stood, slim and frail, before him, her large eyes fixed on his.

"I guess we are tired of more than that, you and I," he pronounced. "But I'll run up and see if the place can be made fit to live in. You had better rest here, in the shade; Frederick will take care of you and Lenoir is within call. Here, senor, set a chair here under these trees."

She moved to the seat placed for her by the deferential host, and watched her father's departure up the winding road. They were both thinking of Corrie, lacking whom all places were blank, with whom, in one winter's enthusiasm, they had studied this soft Spanish tongue they now used without him. They had planned a trip to Puerto Rico, then, that never had been taken. But Flavia also was thinking of Allan Gerard—Allan Gerard, who loved Isabel and for whose sake Flavia carried a double sorrow, his and her own. As he had found excuses in his mind for her apparent failure of him, so she on her part never had blamed him for what she considered her own misunderstanding of his purpose. They were not given to the small vice of ready condemnation. There is no comfort in blaming the one loved, where the love is great.

A murmur of wondering dismay aroused Flavia from her musing, a sound scarcely louder than the murmur of the bees busied among the heavy waxen-white lemon-blossoms overhead. She lifted her chin from her hand, and saw a brown-haired, brown-skinned, brown-eyed girl standing on the path, gazing at the huge dog that barred her passage.

"Pray do not be frightened," Flavia begged. "Come here, Frederick! Indeed, he is only a young dog and very gentle."

"He is very large, senorita," the girl smiled, half-reassured, half-fearful. "He bites, no?"

"No, indeed. See."

"He loves the senorita. That does not surprise," with Latin grace of compliment.

Flavia smiled, too, drawing the Great Dane's bulky head against her knee.

"I love him, perhaps."

"One sees it, since he voyages with the senores in that splendid automobile, where a man might find place with joy."

A wistfulness in the comment moved the listener to give explanation, almost in apology for lavishing upon an animal what might have rejoiced a human being.

"He is my brother's dog. But my brother went away, and the poor dog grieved for him all the time, except with me. I could not leave him to fret, without either of us, so he came abroad, too."

"Across the ocean, senorita?"

"Across the ocean. From America."

The two young girls considered one another in a pause full of cordial sympathy. Different in race, station and experience, the bond of maidenhood drew them to each other with delicate lines of mutual comprehension and accord.

"It is the dog's name which is on the great silver-and-leather collar, or the name of the senorita?"

Flavia's small fair hand guided the plump brown one tracing the legend upon the massive band.

"'Federigo el Grande, que pertenece a Corwin Basil Rose, Long Island,'" she translated.

"Don Corwin—that does not say itself easily!"

"We called him Corrie."

"Ah, that I can say; Don Corrie."

The soft household name sounded yet softer in the Andalusian accents. Flavia looked away, feeling her lips quiver.

"Will you tell me your name?" she asked, by way of diversion. "Mine is Flavia Rose. Perhaps we shall see more of each other, if I stay here and you do also."

"I am called Elvira Paredes, senorita. And I shall be here—I cannot go for so long, so long, perhaps never."

Flavia leaned forward, her clear eyes questioning.

"You want to go away? To leave this place for some other?"

The confidence came with an outrush of feeling, a wealth of expression and expressive gestures.

"Senorita, to join my betrothed. Ah, there never was one like him, so beautiful, so brave, so constant like the sun in rising! You cannot know. No one can know who has not seen it. And sing! Under my window he would sing until the birds would hush, hush to listen. I have no marriage-portion, I who am an orphan living with the sister of my mother's cousin. Not for that did Luis hesitate. But the time came when he must do military service; serve in Morocco, senorita, serve among savages who would torture him! And to come back poor as he went. So he left. Far away he journeyed, to New York, which is in America, to find peace and make a home."

"Where you will go to him?"

"Senorita, we hope it. He works, I wait. We write long letters. But it is three years. It costs much to cross the ocean, and one grows old." The brown eyes looked the tragedy of hope deferred.

"For men must work and women must weep——" The old refrain came to Flavia. But not this woman, not if her American sister could prevent. And the preventing was so easy! She drew the girl down on the seat beside her, impulsive as Corrie could have been.

"Listen, Elvira—I may call you Elvira? Let me help you. I have so much money, so much more than I can spend, and I am not very happy. Let me think that I have given you what I cannot have; let me send you to Luis. My father will tell us how, he will arrange everything so that you will not have to trouble at all. We will send a message to Luis so that he may meet you."

"Senorita!"

"You will let me? You will not say no? Why, Elvira!"

The girl dropped her face in Flavia's lap and burst into hysterical tears, covering her hands with kisses.

When Mr. Rose returned, half an hour later, this time in the big automobile whose rushing passage stirred whirlwinds of dust on the age-old road, his daughter met him eagerly.

"Papa, I want to send Elvira Paredes to America, to her fiancee. She is a kinswoman of the inn-keeper, here. Will you arrange it for us? I think she would be frightened if you sent her by first-class, but second-class would be very nice. She knows how to go in the train to Malaga, if you get the ticket, and ships sail from there, do they not? Oh, and would you cable to Luis Cardenas, in New York, so he will know she is coming? I will find the street and number from Elvira."

His children long since had trained Mr. Rose to be surprised at no charming vagaries. He contemplated Flavia, amused, and well pleased with her animation.

"Found something to play with, eh? Very good, we will fix it. But your Elvira will have to wait until I get an answer from her lover through the cable company; I'm sending no girls to New York without knowing they'll land in the right hands. Now, I believe that house up there will suit. We'll have some luncheon and then drive up for you to see it. I like the place, myself. It opens well."

It opened well, if the happiness of Elvira Paredes was a good augury.

"All the rest is from my father," Flavia said, in parting from her. "But take this from me, to wear or for a marriage portion, as you choose."

The gift was a sapphire ring slipped from Flavia's slim finger.

"It resembles the eyes of the senorita; may they always be as bright and clear," fervently returned Elvira, who was an Andalusian and therefore a poet.

"That cost some money, when I bought it," Mr. Rose practically observed, from his seat in the motor-car. "Tell her not to flash it in New York, alone, if she wants to keep it. You can put that into classic Spanish for me, my girl."

That was the beginning of an interlude whose placid monotony was tempered by much equally placid incident. The Americans liked the village, and the village rejoiced in the Americans, so that they came to know each other very well. More than once Flavia thought of the legend of Al-Mansor, and that if one of these days could be deemed happy enough to record by a pearl, the vase could be filled with the gem-chronicles, so much alike were the weeks.

For the white castle on the hill kept its visitors, and so it happened that the summer most crowded and busy of any Corrie ever had known, slipped drowsily by in drowsy Val de Rosas for the two most interested in him.

He never told Flavia what he was doing. The new Corrie Rose was more considerate than the self-centred thoughtlessness of youth had permitted the boy Corrie to be. He would have remembered her anxiety for his safety and dread of danger for him, of himself, but his silence was further impelled by Gerard, who had pointed out—in a few brief sentences that avoided Flavia's name—the responsibility she must feel in keeping such a secret from her father. But, because it was so difficult to write to his "Other Fellow" without telling her all, Corrie's letters came with greater intervals and were less in length.

"I am still touring with Gerard," he wrote to Flavia, in the last note of his that came to Val de Rosas. "Don't mind if my letters come slower, please; I am pretty busy. I guess you will understand what it means to me when I can say that I am doing some work for Gerard and that he calls it good. I wish it cost me more to do. I hope father is well; you didn't say, last time. Keep on writing often, you know, it's the next thing to seeing you."

He wrote that note the night after he broke a track record in California, wrote it on the chiffonier of the hotel bedroom while making ready to attend a motor club dinner at which he was to be chief guest in honor of the day's event. Four weeks later Flavia read it, under the flowering almond trees that surrounded the house so closely as to overhang the balcony on which she sat. Read it, then kissed the careless, boyish Corwin B. Rose that slanted crookedly across the foot of the page. Holding the letter, she sat quite still.

From the room within drifted the voices of Mr. Rose and the mild Father Bartolome, between whom the last months had established a cordial basis of esteem. The village priest had dined with them; it was in deference to his presence that Flavia wore a gown whose lace collar came up to her round chin, and now had left the two gentlemen to after-dinner conversation instead of herself entertaining her father. She had the sense of being horribly alone; her longing for Corrie became physical pain, so that she crushed the letter in her fingers, catching her breath with difficulty. Close to one another they always had been, still closer together trouble had drawn them, but now half the world stretched its empty spaces between. The impulse that goaded her was to cry out to her father that she must see Corrie—to take her to him—yet she did not speak or move, resolute in endurance. To make that appeal to her father would be to separate Corrie from Allan Gerard, she knew, to bring her brother back to the atmosphere of constraint and reproach to escape which he had left the rose-colored Long Island villa they called home.

"Taxes are taxes," Mr. Rose's raised accents set forth. "Governments have to be maintained. If the tax collector is due to-morrow, Val de Rosas has got to pay up."

There was a murmured reply in the softer tones.

"No money?" the American echoed. "I suppose I could guess that." There came the crisp sound of parting paper. "Now, if you will make a figure for the total, Father, I'll give you this check to pay for the whole thing. I've lived in this town five months, and I like the people—it's my treat. No, I haven't counted the chickens and measured the houses, but I can see the amount isn't exactly ruinous. Now, we won't talk any more about it; here you are."

"Senor Rose," solemnly said the old man, with inexpressible dignity and authority,—Flavia heard him rise,—"this will be repaid by the One to Whom you lend through the poor—repaid to you, and to your daughter."

There was a moment's pause.

"You might include my son in that; I've got one, you know," suggested Thomas Rose, carefully casual.

Flavia covered her eyes, and the tears trickled through her slender fingers.

When the moon was up and the pant of a distant motor announced that the guest was being conveyed to the village by Lenoir and the big automobile, Flavia went in to her father. Both of them maintained their usual composure, as they smiled at one another across the room, but the young girl's extreme pallor was not to be disguised when she came into the light. Mr. Rose looked at her, and continued to look.

"You're not well, my girl," he asserted, concerned. "Never mind drawing that curtain; come over here. Don't you think it's time to tell me why you sent off Gerard? I know how hard it must have hit him, when he was down already, and I've felt sorry often enough, but a man has to take a woman's answer and I've said nothing. But I believed at home that you liked him, and I believe you have been fretting ever since."

Flavia grasped the heavy curtain, gazing at him in an utter confusion of thought that amounted to actual giddiness.

"I—I sent away Mr. Gerard?" she marvelled.

"Who else? Or if you accepted him, why was I not told?"

"Will you tell me what you mean?" she asked brokenly.

"Mean? I mean that the last time I saw Allan Gerard alone, on the day I met you and Corrie driving home together, he asked my permission to propose to you. I rather guess that hour with him didn't make me very easy on Corrie, although I was given no cause to be otherwise by Gerard. Gerard said frankly that he wouldn't have offered you such a wreck as he felt himself, much as he loved you, if he had not gone so far before he was hurt that he had no right to leave in silence. He said that as a matter of honorable justice he must lay the decision before you and abide by your will. Very quiet, he was—I told him that I would rather give you to him than to any other man on earth, and I meant it."

The room blurred before Flavia's dilated eyes.

"You never told me! Papa, you never told me!"

The passionate cry of grief brought Mr. Rose to his feet.

"Told you? Gerard was to tell you. I wanted to carry him home with me that afternoon, but he refused. In fact, he was not fit, nor I either, to stand any more sentiment just then. He said he would write and ask you to see him, if you cared to have him speak or come back at all. That trip West he had to take. Didn't he write?"

She saw the softly-lighted little room at home where Jack Rupert had come to her, and Isabel's suffused, desperate face as she snatched the letter from its owner. And as a pendant picture she saw the bleak, solitary railway station in the gray December morning, where Gerard, ill and reft of his splendid strength, had waited alone for the girl who did not come.

Mr. Rose reached her as she swayed forward.

"Take me home," she gasped, clinging to him with small fierce hands. "I never knew. Dear, take me home."

The next morning they left Val de Rosas.

It is a long journey from Andalusia to New York. But it was on the morning they boarded the ocean liner that Mr. Rose purchased a New York journal—and met a news item that gave him material for thought during the rest of the trip. The item was on the sporting page, and stated that the Cup race course was now open for practice; among the first of the cars to commence training being the Mercury Titan, driven by Corrie Rose—one of the cleverest young professionals in America, whose work with the Mercury Company's special racing machine had given the greatest satisfaction to its owner and designer, Mr. Allan Gerard.

There was no longer any cause for concealment. When Mr. Rose carried the journal to Flavia, she told him quite simply to whom Corrie had gone in his exile and what she knew of his life with Gerard. Of his racing she herself had been left ignorant; she could guess whose forgiving tenderness had spared her that anxiety.

"You are not angry with Corrie," she ventured, before her father's knit brow and squared jaw. "You did not forbid him to race or he would not have done so, I am sure."

"No, I did not. I didn't think I had to," was the dry response. "Angry? He and I are past that. The days are gone when we used to have our differences and shake hands on them. We'll get along together quietly enough, I dare say."

"Now, I would rather you said you were angry," she grieved.

Thomas Rose thrust his hands into his pockets, looking down at the newspaper page. He had altered during the last year in a way difficult to characterize. It was not that he looked older or more hard, there was no bitterness in the strong face, but he looked like a man who stood in the shadow instead of in the sun.

"So would Corrie, I fancy," he said heavily.

Corrie's sister folded her hands in her lap.

"Is there no chance if one falls once?" she rebelled in futile reproach. "He was so young, he has suffered so much—can he never pay?"

"I'm not much of a reader, as a rule, but I did a good deal of it at Val de Rosas, this summer," Mr. Rose slowly returned. "And a line from an Englishman's work stuck in my memory. He said that tears can wash out guilt, but not shame. I can give Corrie all I've got, I have always been fond of him and I am yet, but I can't give him my respect. It was a shameful thing to strike down an unprepared man from behind, because he was losing in a game. Some things can't be paid for, because they are not bought and sold. Of course he will have every chance possible. He isn't what I supposed; well, there is no use of complaining, we will make the best of what he is. I sent him away while we settled down to living on the new basis; I guess we are as ready to go on, now, as we ever will be."

"If he heard you say that, I think he would die," she stated her hopeless conviction.

"People don't die so easily, my girl. I tell you he and I will get along well enough. Pass me those books over there."

Flavia obeyed, having no words. Mr. Rose sat down and compared the date of the steamer's probable arrival with that of the Cup race.



XV

THE STRENGTH OF TEN

It had required more than eloquence or tact, it had required actual compulsion to bring Corrie Rose back to race at Long Island. All his successful work, all the cordiality that met him wherever he went, and the temptation to essay new conquest, failed to overcome his repugnance. But he could not defy Gerard.

"I don't see how you can bear to look at the place," he had flung, in his final defeat.

"My dear Corrie, I am not any further from that here than there," Gerard had quietly replied.

Corrie understood, and submitted dumbly thereafter. And, in spite of himself, his first day's practice on the course swept everything aside except eager exhilaration. He was too superbly healthy for morbidity, too masculine for continuous dwelling in memories; if Gerard had not been very certain of that fact, he would never have brought his ward there. When Corrie was driving, Corrie was happy. He drove with a sober intensity of devotion, his passion was serious, whereas Gerard had raced fire-ardent and won or lost laughing.

There was a small hotel near the course which the motor-men had made a rendezvous. Here Gerard established his party, during the two weeks of practice work. He did not choose to have Corrie in New York, although Rupert chafed and he himself was obliged to go in to the city frequently, at considerable inconvenience.

On the last afternoon before the race, he returned from such a trip, and arrived before the hotel just as Corrie rolled up with the Mercury Titan and halted it opposite him.

"It's five o'clock," the driver explained, stilling his roaring motor and leaning out. "Everyone is coming in, to get ready for to-morrow."

There was little trace left of the petulant, gaudily dressed boy who a year before had driven the pink car, in this serious young professional clad in the Mercury's racing gray and bearing the Mercury's silver insignia on his shoulder. The bend of his mouth was firmer, his dark-blue eyes had acquired the steady, all-embracing keenness of Gerard's—the gaze of all those men with whom the inopportune flicker of an eyelid may mean destruction. He was clothed with his virile youth as with a radiant garment, as he smiled across at Gerard.

"Yes, get some rest; you will be out at dawn," approved Gerard, coming closer. "Where is Rupert? What is the matter, Corrie? You look disturbed."

"Rupert got off at the corner, back there. I suppose if I look rattled, that he is what is the matter. He——" Corrie suddenly dropped his face in his folded arms as they rested upon the steering-wheel, his shoulders shaking.

"He? How? He has been talking to you?"

"He sure has been talking to me," Corrie affirmed, lifting his laughter-flushed face. "When I think that he once gave me the silence treatment! His tongue would take the starch out of a Chinese laundry and make a taxicab chauffeur feel he couldn't drive."

"You do not let him talk to you when you are driving!"

"Oh, when I am driving he is the perfect mechanician. He wouldn't open his lips if I hit a right-angle turn at ninety miles an hour or disobey if I told him to climb out and cut the tires off the rear wheels. No, it is when I am not officially driving that he gives me some remarks to study about. Good pointers, too! I like it, really. I only wish," his expression shadowed abruptly, "I only wish I didn't have to remember that nothing could bring him to shake hands with me."

"Corrie——"

"I know—I beg your pardon for speaking of that to you. But, Gerard," he bent to grasp a lever, "I'd take what you got last year, I'd consent to be picked up dead from under my car to-morrow, if I could that way buy one hour to stand clean before you and Jack Rupert. That's all—don't think I want to flinch, please. If you will go on in, I'll put this machine away and be back to dinner in fifteen minutes. I see Rupert coming to help me, now. We're starved to death and some tired. By the way, George shouted over to me that he would be in as soon as he got the Duplex canned for the night, and to order a few dozen eggs and a couple of hams fried for him. Would you attend to it on your way in?"

"I surely would," Gerard answered, the great gentleness of his tone mating oddly with the light words. "What do you want ordered for yourself?"

"Anything, and plenty of it."

Gerard did not smile as he went into the building. He too would have given much to spare Corrie Rose the memory of that October morning's fault. From all punishment except that memory he had sheltered him, further aid no one could give. But because he loved Corrie, he climbed the hotel stairs in slow abstraction and failed to perceive the limousine that came up before the Mercury Titan, and stopped.

He was standing by a table in the empty parlor of the hotel, when the door opened, and closed. Thinking some other guest had entered, he did not turn from the letters he was reading, nor was there any further movement or demand upon his attention. That which slowly invaded his consciousness was a summons more delicate than sound, a faint, distinctive flower-fragrance that proclaimed one individual presence. Flavia Rose was in the room; he knew it before he swung around and saw her standing there.

The shock that leaped along his pulses was less of hope than of renewed pain.

"Miss Rose!" he exclaimed.

She moved a little forward. Against her dark velvet gown, under her wide velvet hat, her soft, earnest face showed whitely lustrous and irradiated, her beautiful eyes dwelt on his.

"I never knew," she said, her clear voice like rippled water. "Your letter, the night before you went away, never came to me. I never knew you had sent for me, until last month."

The movement that brought Gerard across the room was as nakedly passionate as the incoherent simplicity of her speech.

"You never knew? Flavia, you would have come?"

"I would have come; I wanted to come long before, while you were so ill——"

They had waited a year on the verge of that moment; it was enough to touch one another in this security of understanding. There was no question between them, no doubt, now that they saw each other face to face; all their world flowered into light and fragrance, present and future one dazzling marvel.

But at last they drew slightly apart, gazing at each other with an incredulity of such happiness, both Flavia's little hands held in the firm clasp of Gerard's left. And then gradually awoke amazement that they could ever have been separated, who were so closely bound together.

"My dear, my dear, you knew I loved you," he wondered. "How did this happen to us?"

"How could I know? You had never said it."

"Did I need to? I thought the very stones in the fountain arcade must have seen it. And I trusted Rupert with the letter; he said he had given it to you, he even brought an answer."

"Do not blame him," she quickly defended. "He told you that he had given it to Miss Rose; he meant to Isabel, who claimed it."

"Your cousin? What had I to do with her? Why should I have written to her? Have written that, Flavia!"

The tears rushed to her eyes.

"Your letter—Allan, if I had known that message was for me, I would have gone back with Rupert to you that evening. But Isabel took it, for some reason she expected a message from you, that night. I have not been able to understand that, although I have tried ever since papa told me, last month, that it was I whom you chose. She spoke of something Corrie had said. I—I think she believed you did care for her more seriously than she had meant you should. She was so very sure the letter was for her—and you did not call me Flavia once."

"I had no right, I dared not. Dear, I had had a bad month; I did not remember that any Miss Rose but you existed. I used to close my eyes, when things were worst, and see your eyes against the dark. There were days when I did not see much else. But they were not so bad, no day ever was so bad as the morning Corrie came to the station without you. Forgive me, I hurt you!"

She shook her fair head, wordless. Quiet from the very vehemence of feeling that possessed them both, Gerard stooped and kissed her.

"Will you marry me soon, Flavia? After this race, when Corrie can be with us? Let us waste no more time apart; I have wanted you so long, so very long."

The lovely color flushed her transparent face, but her fingers clung to his.

"All the way home from Spain, I have been remembering that I really was betrothed to you this whole year," she answered, not turning from him the innocent candor of her clear gaze. "Before that, before I knew the truth, I used to think how strange a thing it would have been if you had died in the accident and I had lived all the rest of my life believing myself promised to you, when in fact you had loved Isabel, not me. I used to think, often, of that first day when I fell on the stairs at the Beach race track—when you caught me and held me close to you—and how you would never again hold me like that or miss not doing so. I am quite sure that no one ever was wanted so much as I have wanted you. It may not be right to tell this even to you, but it is true. And I will marry you whenever you ask, Allan."

Allan Gerard, man of the practical world and the twentieth century, went to his knee on the floor of the hotel parlor and hid his face against her hand.

The room was rosy with the glow of sunset, when someone discreetly knocked. In response to Gerard's invitation to enter, the door opened and revealed the wiry, jersey-clad form of Rupert on the threshold. Grimy yet from his recent employment, he was engaged in deftly winding a strip of antiseptic gauze around his wrist while he spoke.

"I ain't one to invite li'l' Artha' Brownskin to meet the A.M.A. on Sunday," he began discontentedly, and broke off at sight of Flavia.

"I don't need to introduce you to Miss Rose," smiled Gerard. "What have you done to your wrist? Much?"

"Scratched it threading my sewing-machine; I'll be able to sit up in bed to-morrow," reassured the mechanician, his acute black eyes travelling from the young girl to his chief. "I didn't mean to run into this camp without being signalled. As I was saying, I ain't one to promote trouble, but there's a gentleman downstairs who's calling off our race."

"What?"

"Mr. Rose is explaining to our driver that he ain't fit to be allowed on a race course. And no one's opposing his remarks any."

Gerard divined the situation.

"Go down," Flavia begged, as he turned to her. "I have been selfish to keep you here; I might have known! But I saw Corrie just for a moment, then father sent me to you. Go to Corrie; Mr. Rupert will bring me."

"I can guess that I'm a fierce bad postman," Rupert dryly acknowledged. "But I ain't likely to confuse ladies on the way downstairs. You're sure needed below."

In the empty paved space before the hotel, the Mercury Titan still reposed its massive bulk, with its driver in his seat, his fair head uncovered in the pink-and-gold light and his face turned to the man who stood beside the car. There was neither heat nor resentment in either Mr. Rose's expression or his son's as the older man came over to shake hands with Gerard. Corrie did not move; his left arm was thrown about the neck of the huge dog reared up beside him against the machine.

"I'm glad to see you looking so well," Mr. Rose briefly greeted. "I have been talking to Corrie, here, while we waited for you, Gerard, but this thing won't do."

"What won't do, Mr. Rose?" Gerard questioned, equally matter-of-fact.

"You know, and Corrie knows. I appreciate the way you have stood by him and the way he has kept to his work—I'm proud of it—but this isn't a question of how any of us three feel. I am sorry to hurt him, but we have got to face facts. A man who loses his temper is not fit for certain places; a race track is one."

"The Corrie Rose whom I know and who trained under me is fit for any place," Gerard gravely maintained. The work of months was on the verge of loss; he gauged very exactly what this sentence would result in for Flavia's brother.

Mr. Rose glanced towards his son; if his powerful, square-cut face was inflexible, it was without hardness.

"Gerard, I am sorry," he repeated. "It's like you to overlook what happened to yourself and try him again; he and I have got more to consider and to be responsible for. He might race straight for years, yes, forever; but his temper might slip him to-morrow. I know he means right, but it can't be chanced. I'll risk seeing no more men picked up as you were. Corrie, whenever I've said must—that hasn't been often—you've answered. I think you will now. Get off that machine and come home with me, my boy; we will try a fresh start, you and I."

Corrie stirred slightly; even his lips were gray and dark circles appeared suddenly stamped beneath his eyes. He offered no defence or demur, but before his movement could spell obedience Gerard had sprung across the intervening space and dropped his left hand on the driver's arm, forcing him to retain his seat.

"Stay there," he commanded curtly. "You are my employee, under contract to drive my cars this season; if you break your signed agreement I will bring you up before the A.M.A. board and have you suspended for unprofessional conduct."

Corrie gasped as from a dash of cold water in the face, the rough tonic effectually bringing him out of his daze of habitual submission.

"Mr. Rose, this is not sentiment, but business," Gerard continued in his usual tone. "Corrie is not racing to-morrow for the first time, or for the fifth or sixth, this season. He is the cordially liked and respected comrade of his fellow-drivers—there is not one who would not laugh in your face at the idea of fearing to have him among them. I tell you, for the rest, that any other man on the course might let his nerves trick his self-control; Corrie Rose never will. I know him, now, better than you yet can. But," he snatched a rapid survey of Corrie, then lifted his hand from the other's arm and drew back, "he is not a child; let him decide."

"Corrie——" his father recommenced, his voice choked.

But Corrie had found himself. He laid one firm, gauntleted hand on the beloved steering-wheel and turned to Mr. Rose the serious countenance and steadfast eyes of the new Corrie of the Mercury's making. With the other hand he pressed the dog's great head closer to him; perhaps only Allan Gerard saw and translated the pathos of that unconscious gesture.

"I would do anything else, sir," he stated simply. "But Gerard has stayed by me through the worst time I will ever have. I know—you gave me money; but he helped me live. Afterward I will do whatever you bid me, now I cannot leave him without a driver on the eve of a race. All the more," his speaking glance went to Gerard, "all the more I must stay, because he would rather hold me strictly to a business contract than remind me that I owe him anything or that it is through me that he is not driving this car himself."

There was a moment of absolute silence. Then the rustle of soft garments came with Flavia's swift crossing from the doorway where she and Rupert had witnessed the contest. Straight to the side of the gray machine she went, and clasping her little hands over her brother's arm, raised to him the high trust and unchanging love of her regard.

"Dearest, I hope you win, to-morrow," she said bravely and sweetly. "But kiss me, Corrie, and come home afterward. We need you, papa and I—and Allan."

"Other Fellow," he thanked her, under his breath, and leaned down to give the caress.

Gerard and Mr. Rose were looking at each other.

"You win," conceded the older man, without rancor. "I hope we are not sorry. Bring him to the house after you get through, to-morrow, I guess we'll be a family party."