They turned away from the river, crossing the hills of a rolling country now open, now wooded, passing white farmhouses and red barns, and ancient, weather-beaten dwellings with hipped roofs and “lean-tos” which had been there in colonial days when the road was a bridle-path.  Cows and horses stood gazing at them from warm paddocks, where the rich, black mud glistened, melted by the sun; chickens scratched and clucked in the barnyards or flew frantically across the road, sometimes within an ace of destruction.  Janet flinched, but Ditmar would laugh, gleefully, boyishly.

“We nearly got that one!” he would exclaim.  And then he had to assure her that he wouldn’t run over them.

“I haven’t run over one yet,—­have I?” he would demand.

“No, but you will, it’s only luck.”

“Luck!” he cried derisively.  “Skill!  I wish I had a dollar for every one I got when I was learning to drive.  There was a farmer over here in Chester—­” and he proceeded to relate how he had had to pay for two turkeys.  “He got my number, the old hayseed, he was laying for me, and the next time I went back that way he held me up for five dollars.  I can remember the time when a man in a motor was an easy mark for every reuben in the county.  They got rich on us.”

She responded to his mood, which was wholly irresponsible, exuberant, and they laughed together like children, every little incident assuming an aspect irresistibly humorous.  Once he stopped to ask an old man standing in his dooryard how far it was to Kingsbury.

“Wal, mebbe it’s two mile, they mostly call it two,” said the patriarch, after due reflection, gathering his beard in his band.  “Mebbe it’s more.”  His upper lip was blue, shaven, prehensile.

“What did you ask him for, when you know?” said Janet, mirthfully, when they had gone on, and Ditmar was imitating him.  Ditmar’s reply was to wink at her.  Presently they saw another figure on the road.

“Let’s see what he’ll say,” Ditmar proposed.  This man was young, the colour of mahogany, with glistening black hair and glistening black eyes that regarded the too palpable joyousness of their holiday humour in mute surprise.

“I no know—­stranger,” he said.

“No speaka Portugueso?” inquired Ditmar, gravely.

“The country is getting filthy with foreigners,” he observed, when he had started the car.  “I went down to Plymouth last summer to see the old rock, and by George, it seemed as if there wasn’t anybody could speak American on the whole cape.  All the Portuguese islands are dumped there —­cranberry pickers, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Janet.

“Sure thing!” he exclaimed.  “And when I got there, what do you think? there was hardly enough of the old stone left to stand on, and that had a fence around it like an exhibit in an exposition.  It had all been chipped away by souvenir hunters.”

She gazed at him incredulously.