“I am Evan MacIan,” said that gentleman, and stood up in a sort of gloomy pomp, not wholly without a touch of the sulks of a schoolboy.

“Yes, we will get out, sergeant,” said Turnbull, more easily; “my name is James Turnbull.  We must not incommode the lady.”

“What are you taking them up for?” asked the young woman, looking straight in front of her along the road.

“It’s under the new act,” said the sergeant, almost apologetically.  “Incurable disturbers of the peace.”

“What will happen to them?” she asked, with the same frigid clearness.

“Westgate Adult Reformatory,” he replied, briefly.

“Until when?”

“Until they are cured,” said the official.

“Very well, sergeant,” said the young lady, with a sort of tired common sense.  “I am sure I don’t want to protect criminals or go against the law; but I must tell you that these gentlemen have done me a considerable service; you won’t mind drawing your men a little farther off while I say good night to them.  Men like that always misunderstand.”

The sergeant was profoundly disquieted from the beginning at the mere idea of arresting anyone in the company of a great lady; to refuse one of her minor requests was quite beyond his courage.  The police fell back to a few yards behind the car.  Turnbull took up the two swords that were their only luggage; the swords that, after so many half duels, they were now to surrender at last.  MacIan, the blood thundering in his brain at the thought of that instant of farewell, bent over, fumbled at the handle and flung open the door to get out.

But he did not get out.  He did not get out, because it is dangerous to jump out of a car when it is going at full speed.  And the car was going at full speed, because the young lady, without turning her head or so much as saying a syllable, had driven down a handle that made the machine plunge forward like a buffalo and then fly over the landscape like a greyhound.  The police made one rush to follow, and then dropped so grotesque and hopeless a chase.  Away in the vanishing distance they could see the sergeant furiously making notes.

The open door, still left loose on its hinges, swung and banged quite crazily as they went whizzing up one road and down another.  Nor did MacIan sit down; he stood up stunned and yet staring, as he would have stood up at the trumpet of the Last Day.  A black dot in the distance sprang up a tall black forest, swallowed them and spat them out again at the other end.  A railway bridge grew larger and larger till it leapt upon their backs bellowing, and was in its turn left behind.  Avenues of poplars on both sides of the road chased each other like the figures in a zoetrope.  Now and then with a shock and rattle they went through sleeping moonlit villages, which must have stirred an instant in their sleep as at the passing of a fugitive earthquake.  Sometimes in an outlying house a light in one erratic,