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

“Why can’t you take Miss Herron over, Mr. Fraser – hey? I guess that there autobile – ”

“That – ”

“Autobile,” repeated the agent, sturdily. “She’ll beat most o’ the trains on this road.”

“The very thing!” He made a mental promise never to forget this man’s kindness and tact. “Oldport! It wouldn’t take us an hour; and it’s the best piece of road in the State.”

“The idea!” exclaimed Miss Herron, gently scornful. “In an – automobile!”

“Please come,” he begged. “It would be such an honor, and a pleasure, too.”

“I should prefer the train.” But the very fact that she let a note of argument and protest come into her voice gave Archibald instant encouragement.

The station agent, warned by a furious wink, came nobly to the fore. “I’m afraid the train ain’t goin’ to do ye much good, ma’am. Not for some time, anyway. I never see such a road’s this.”

“I’ll go very carefully,” Archie went on, recklessly promising.

“Of course, you know, I dislike those machines, but,” Miss Herron confessed, with a fair show of sincerity, “I am rather eager to be present at this meeting.” She surveyed with critical eye the deep-cushioned seats, the heavy springs, then the tiller and the various start-and-stop levers. “You think there’ll be no danger?”

“Not the least. I’m sure you’d not be afraid, Miss Herron.”

“I am afraid,” she replied, tartly, “of nothing that man can devise. Be so good as to lend me your arm, Mr. Fraser.”

He charmed her by his deferential escort across the platform; he protected the rustling silk of her skirt from any possible fleck of dirt as she mounted to her place; he was solicitous, as a gentleman should be, concerning the dust cloth, and deft as a footman in arranging it. Clearly, as Miss Herron perceived, the boy appreciated the honor she was doing him, and so far earned her approval. Nor were his manners wholly uncouth.

Archie drew on his gauntlets and settled himself, hands on tiller and throttle. “Are you quite ready?” He could not hide his smile. A sweet hour was to follow.

“I am waiting,” she answered.

“Go, then.”

The ponderous machine leaped forward as if released from a spring, gathering power and speed each half second. Miss Herron laid her hand on the driver’s arm.

“Not too fast – all at once,” she said. “I – ”

“She’ll do better when we strike the good road,” the driver replied. “This sand checks her badly.”

It was so lovely a revenge that lay now in his hand to inflict. This old lady had towed him home once, the laughingstock of the village; she had brought to naught at the same time the scheme which had cost Lucy and himself such a deal of planning. The machine was to be abandoned, they had arranged in that runaway afternoon when Miss Herron kept her room; the carriage was to overtake him in his distress; he was to drive home with the two ladies, holding Lucy’s hand on the back seat, and convincing Miss Herron of his superior qualifications to marry into her family. But all this had in the sequel come to less than nothing. It was Miss Herron also who, Archie was convinced, had been at the bottom of his father’s sudden determination to attach him to the Paris branch of the Fraser business, and so banish him from all that was dearest and best in the world.

Now, by blessed good luck, Miss Herron was quite in his power to frighten soundly and to land at the gathering of the elect, blown, dusty and disheveled. If he had been more than twenty, he would have thought and acted otherwise than he did; but the likely outcome of his plan never troubled the boy, if indeed it entered his honest head at all. “I’ll scare her,” remarked Archie, grinning silently, “good and hard.”

But, even as he plotted, he wooed her with his politest phrases; laughed, but not too loudly, at the little sparkles of wit, accepted with naïve delight her comments on the skill in driving that a boy of his age could show. For five minutes or so they ran quietly and steadily along a featureless road through barren pastures. There was time enough for his plan to blossom, for Oldport was nearly thirty miles away, and there intervened a village through which to drive at illegal speed.

But by slow degrees, without at all perceiving how it came about, Archie found that somehow his passenger was a very delightful old lady. What had become of the absurd starchiness, which before had so maddened him, of the stiff pride, which had condescended to him as though Fraser & Co. were creatures far beneath the regard of a New England old maid? She asked him questions, she was as interested as could be in his father’s plans for him.

“Where will you live in Paris?” asked Miss Herron.

“Oh, over in the Quarter, I hope. It’d be more fun there than in the other house.”

“The other house?”

“Ours, you know. Father likes to have his own place when he’s over.”

“Indeed?”

“We only lease it,” Archie explained, ingenuously. “It’s up near the Arch.”

“Indeed! That should be extremely pleasant.”

“I hate the idea of going,” the boy blurted out. He looked straight ahead; a slow flush darkened his fair skin.

“Yes?”

“Unless,” he murmured, suddenly inspired to madness, “unless – ”

Miss Herron readjusted the dust cloth. The boy felt a quick irritation at her apparent inattention; but the purpose, born of her apparent readiness to hear and approve him, held. “I want Lucy to go, too, Miss Herron,” he announced, bluntly enough.

“Indeed!”

“Lucy!” he cried. “I do love her so! Please say that I can have her. Please say – ”

“Do I understand,” she asked, and the boy could not comprehend why her old voice shook so, “that you are making a formal proposal for the hand of Miss Lucy Herron?”

“Yes,” he cried, jubilantly. “Oh, say I may ask her.”

“If you had intended so far to honor us,” the old lady replied, icily, “I should have thought that you would have approached the subject with some degree of formality.”

“Miss Herron!”

“To speak of such matters in an – automobile is to treat them very unbecomingly. It is not,” she continued, and all her unbending rigidity of demeanor was behind her words, “dignified.”

“Being dignified,” cried Archie, hotly, “hasn’t anything to do with being in love.” Was it a smile that lighted up her craggy features, like sunshine on granite. “You don’t understand.”

“Apparently not. I am quite unused to the ways of modern youth. The world’s moved very fast in recent years. In an – automobile – as it were.”

“But Lucy – ”

“Well, Mr. Fraser?”

“I – ”

“Let us not refer to her, I beg.”

“Not ever again?” he asked, but with no hint of disappointment.

“I am surprised that you so much as dreamed of it under the present circumstances,” she replied, tartly.

Archie laughed shortly. “Please forget that I so far forgot myself,” he begged. “It was wrong, under the present circumstances.” All the boy’s sunny malice shone from his clear eyes. “I ought to have remembered my real duty and pleasure.”