But to the woman who loved Lanyard it was all divine . . .
Summing up another survey of the road behind, she declared: "There is nothing. You have outwitted and distanced them."
"Who can say what may lie in wait for us round the next bend?"
"What does it matter, so we go to meet it together?"
Neither daring to take his eyes from the streaming road nor knowing how to answer her, Lanyard gave only a groan.
"I fear nothing but to be parted from you. Promise we shall never part."
"Michael!" the heartbreaking voice at his shoulder insisted--"why don't you answer me? Surely you can't still be thinking I will ever let you go?"
He contrived to say, almost explosively: "But I must."
"Ah, no, no! Michael, you couldn't hurt me so."
"Is not tonight enough to prove to you no man who loved you truly could consent to expose you to such a life? It is my fate to love you too well . . ."
What the woman said to that was lost in the blast of a tyre blown out on one of the front wheels. An instantaneous swerve toward a ditch by the roadside all but wrenched the wheel out of control and resulted in a wreck. As it was, frantic work averted that disaster by the slenderest of scrapes. With locked brakes the brougham skidded drunkenly and rolled to a halt broadside to a bluff over across from the ditch.
With amazing self-command, Lanyard suffered never a syllable of a seething vocabulary to escape his lips as he unlatched the door and leaped down. An instant later Eve on her side alighted and came round to join him. Together, they contemplated in silence the ruptured tyre and the two good spares locked in their rack--and the key in the pocket of a chauffeur sleeping off his drink in the Inn of the Green Woods, fifteen miles or more away!
From contemplation of this bad business, Lanyard turned to consider their position, and found it equally bad. The car stood, as far off the road as it could be, but nevertheless somewhat blocking its narrow width, on the waist of an S bend, with a hillside blinding the approach on one hand, a wilderness of young forest on the other. And even as the thought formed that it would be well to move on at once, headlights illuminated the curve ahead, then swung into view, and a car coming from the direction of New York bore down at nothing less than forty miles an hour.