Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905

“Tell me,” the old lady asked, after they had driven some distance along the shady road, “are you really enjoying your stay here?”

“Yes, indeed. I think Barham’s just lovely.”

“And what’s most lovable in it?”

Lucy stole a look from under her broad hat brim, then retreated. “I don’t believe I know,” she said, simply. “It’s all – ”

“Charming. Of course. I’m glad you think so. We could dispense with the strangers, however. They don’t belong here. They are vulgarly rich and parvenu.”

“Some of them are nice, Cousin Agatha,” the child protested, deferentially.

“Who, for instance?”

“All those who come to the house.”

“A pack of rascals!” the old lady replied, crisply. “Laughing like – hyenas, if that’s the animal. It’s a mercy that the boys and girls are sent to good schools. They learn some decent behavior, though of course they haven’t had your advantages, my dear. But I dislike their mothers. They are rich, but they have no poise. Poise, my dear, and the marks of long descent. But the children may develop. All but one of them.”

Lucy’s face grew gently mutinous. “Which is that, cousin?”

“That yellow-haired boy of – ” She checked her reply abruptly to listen. The horses were reined in. “My dear,” she asked, resignedly, “what was that noise I heard?”

There was no mistaking that honk of the goose many times strengthened, and, following this, the low, steady sputter of a gasoline engine. The nigh horse’s ears pricked up, then were laid back; his honest mate stopped short to await developments.

“I’m afraid,” ventured Lucy, “that it’s an automobile.”

“The wretches, to choose this road! Are they coming? Go along, there!” cried Miss Herron to the horses, who sprang forward as she laid the whip on their fat flanks. “If we can get just beyond the woods I can turn out for it. But – oh, the wretches!”

“Honk-honk!” close behind now.

“Oh!” cried Lucy. She knelt up in the carriage seat, looking back along the road.

“Wave to him, my child.” Miss Herron leaned back on the reins. Her thin cheeks flushed up, and her gray eyes were like coal fires. “Signal the creature to slow up.”

“I am, Cousin Agatha. I am waving as hard as I can.” She was standing now, meeting with a lithe motion of supple knees and slender hips each plunge of the hurrying carriage, one little hand on the back of the seat. And with the other, Lucy, who looked at cousin Agatha and then laughed – just a little – signaled gayly if vaguely to the driver of the coming car. This was a young man, whose hair – for he wore no hat – shone in the sun like crisp gold wire.

“Honk!” spoke the horn, “honk!” and then three times more in quicker succession.

Lucy laughed aloud. “Isn’t he silly?” And then waved once more.

“Honk!”

“Whoa!” commanded Miss Herron, drawing her steeds to the side of the road. “Stand still, and don’t be so foolish. It’s only” – she hesitated, then pronounced the word as though it profaned her speech – “an automobile.”

“May I pass you?” came the driver’s voice from behind. The choking reek of the gas drifted down and enveloped them.

“It’s all right,” caroled Lucy. “Come ahead!” Then she dropped down to her seat beside her companion, light as a sparrow.

“Is it coming?”

The horses snorted, swerved, and plunged heavily. There swept by a vision of dark green and shining brass, the chuck-chuck-chuck of machinery.

“Oh, do be careful, Arch!” cried Lucy, for the ponderous machine ground through the soft bank that hemmed in the road on that side, and canted dangerously for a second or two. Then it whirled up the road, with the dust thick in its trail, and through the haze the driver’s yellow head shining. The fat horses shivered, and stood fast.

“The wretch! I knew it was young Fraser.”

“It wasn’t like him,” Lucy murmured, and a hint of a smile crossed her lips, “to have driven by us so fast.”

“I’d not expect it of him, certainly.”

“Nor I.” And Lucy sighed in spite of herself. She was not very old.

“Ha!” Miss Herron bestowed a lightning glance on her unconscious little passenger, and found it her turn to smile, but with a kind of grimness. “Indeed!” she remarked, and added, under her breath after a queer pause: “How very extraordinary!”

They drove along quietly after that for some minutes, for Miss Herron requested silence that she might compose herself the more readily after her fright. The road led them up a gentle incline, then turned sharp to the right, and a couple of hundred yards forked to lead around both sides of a hill. It was not till the horses approached this point that their driver opened her lips. She had worn, all the time that she was quieting her nerves, a look of anxiety into the midst of which would break every now and then the kindest and briefest of whimsical smiles.

“Which direction shall we take?”

Lucy started from her reverie. She, too, had said no word. “This is Steven’s Forks, isn’t it? Shall we go to the right?”

“Toward home, then?”

“Yes,” said Lucy, eagerly, “toward home. To the right, please.”

The talk brightened then. And Lucy in particular chattered away at desperate speed, exclaiming over the rolling landscape, telling her old hostess how much she had enjoyed Barham.

“That is very pleasant to hear,” replied Miss Herron, graciously enough. “I am only sorry that my indisposition last week prevented our – ”

“Please don’t think of it, Cousin Agatha.”

“No? My dear, have you ever been visited by neuralgia?”

“I mean,” explained the child, eagerly and shyly together, “that it didn’t interfere with my good times at all.”

“I understand. Silly girl, why don’t they teach you to say things properly! But I know exactly what you mean.”

“Not really!” A quick dismay chased away the arch gayety.

“And I’m very glad if you had what you would call a good time.”

“Oh, I did! It’s all been delightful,” Lucy contrived to stammer, and then fell to scanning the road, which stretched away for a long half mile ahead of them, white and level.

“A good road for those wretched machines,” observed Miss Herron. “I see one has been along it.” And she pointed to the track of broad tires they were following.

“Wouldn’t a farm wagon leave those marks?”

“Possibly, but – ” She rose slightly in her seat, and peered ahead. She laughed aloud as she gathered up her reins and touched the horses into a brisk trot. “This may be the workings of Providence, my dear.”

“Perhaps, Cousin Agatha.”