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“I beg your pardon,” he interrupted, and freed his arm. “Awfully sorry. I think a young lady over there wishes to speak to me.”

He left us briskly enough, but he slowed up before he got across the room. He stopped once and half turned, too, with the unhappiest face I’ve ever seen on a human being. Aggie was feeling in her knitting bag for the glasses.

“Is she pretty?” she asked.

“Too pretty to be a second choice,” I replied, shortly. “She’s a nice little thing, and deserves something better than a warmed-over heart.”

Tish had been angry enough before, but when I told her that he had been disappointed in love, and was merely making the girl a tool, her eyes were savage.

“She is pretty,” Aggie observed. “Perhaps, after all, he does love her. Or if not he may learn to. And he cannot be very unhappy about marrying her. He said, you know, it was a perfect day.”

“Go down and get into the car,” Tish said, in a choking voice. “I’ll fix his perfect day for him. Go down and start the engine.”

I took a last glance as Aggie and I left the License Court, and if we had had any doubts they vanished then, because he was speaking to the girl with angry gestures, and she was certainly crying.

“Brute,” Tish said, with her eyes on him. “A bully as well as a slacker. Never mind. She won’t have to put up with him long. If I have any influence in this community that youth will be drafted and sent to a mud hole in France. Mark my words,” she went on, settling her hat with a jerk, “that boy will be registered as a single man before this day’s over. Go and start the engine, Lizzie. I daresay you remember that much.”

Seeing that she had a plan, and “ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die,” as Aggie frequently quotes, we went down to the street again. I was even then vaguely apprehensive, an apprehension not without reason, as it turned out. For, reaching over to start the engine, as Tish had taught me by turning a lever on the dashboard and moving up a throttle on the wheel, what was my horror to see the car moving slowly off, with Aggie in the rear seat and as white as chalk.

Tish, in her patriotic fervor, had stopped the thing in gear.

I ran beside it, but was unable to get onto the running board. I then saw Aggie, generally so timid, crawling over the back of the seat, and called to her to put on the brake. She did so, but not until the car had mounted the sidewalk and struck a policeman in the back.

This would not be worth recording, as there were no immediate results, had it not been for the policeman. It brought us to his attention, and came near to ruining Tish’s plan. But of this later on.

I do not, even now, know just what arguments Tish used with Myrtle. Yes, that was her name. We had a great deal of time later on to learn her name, and all about her. The matter is a delicate one, and we have not since discussed the events of that day. But Aggie said later on, when we were sitting in the dark and wondering what to do next, that Tish had probably waited until Mr. Culver went out to look up a minister.

Whatever Tish said or did, the result was that only a short time after Aggie had jammed on the brake, they came out together, and Tish was carrying a suitcase. Myrtle was hanging back, but Tish had her by the arm.

At first she did not see us. When she did, however, she worked her way through the crowd and opened the rear door.

“Get in,” she said, in an uncompromising tone.

“But I really think,” said Myrtle, “that I should—-“