As she studied him, his eyes met hers, and he surprised her by a quick smile of understanding.

“Oh, Contrary Mary,” he murmured, so that the rest could not hear, “what do you think of me?”

She found herself blushing, “Porter.”

“You were weighing me in the balance?  Red head against my lovely disposition?”

Before she could answer, he had turned back to Aunt Isabelle, leaving Mary with her cheeks hot.

After supper, the young host insisted that Leila and the General should go home in his limousine with Barry and Aunt Isabelle.

“Mary and I will follow in a taxi,” he said in the face of their protests.

“Young man,” demanded the twinkling General, “if I accept, will you look upon me in the light of an incumbrance or a benefactor?”

“A benefactor, sir,” said Porter, promptly, and that settled it.

“And now,” said Porter, as, having seen the rest of the party off, he took his seat beside the slim figure in the green velvet wrap, “now I am going to have it out with you.”

“But—­Porter!”

“I’ve a lot to say.  And we are going to ride around the Speedway while I say it.”

“But—­it’s raining.”

“All the better.  It will be we two and the world away, Mary.”

“And there isn’t anything to say.”

“Oh, yes, there is—­oodles.”

“And Aunt Isabelle will be worried.”

He drew the rug up around her and settled back as placidly as if the hands on the moon face of the clock on the post-office tower were not pointing to midnight.  “Aunt Isabelle has been told,” he informed her, “that you may be a bit late.  I wrote it on the supper card, and she read it—­and smiled.”

He waited in silence until they had left the avenue, and were on the driveway back of the Treasury which leads toward the river.

“Porter, this is a wild thing to do.”

“I’m in a wild mood—­a mood that fits in with the rain and wind, Mary.  I’m in such a mood that if the times were different and the age more romantic, I would pick you up and put you on my champing steed and carry you off to my castle.”

He laughed, and for the moment she was thrilled by his masterfulness.  “But, alas, my steed is a taxi—­the age is prosaic—­and you—­I’m afraid of you, Contrary Mary.”

They were on the Speedway now, faintly illumined, showing a row of waving willow trees, spectrally outlined against a background of gray water.

“I’m afraid of you.  I have always been.  Even when you were only ten and I was fifteen.  I would shake in my shoes when you looked at me, Mary; you were the only one then—­you are the only one—­now.”

Her hand lay on the outside of the rug.  He put his own over it.

“Ever since you said to-night that you didn’t care—­there’s been something singing—­in my brain, and it has said, ’make her care, make her care.’  And I’m going to do it.  I’m not going to trouble you or worry you with it—­and I’m going to take my chances with the rest.  But in the end I’m going to—­win.”