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“This is different,” Tish said. “It is a car—-“

“And that I rode about a quarter of a mile into Lake Penzance, and would likely have ridden straight across if I hadn’t run into a canoe and upset it?”

“You can always stop a car,” said Tish. “Don’t be a coward, Lizzie. All you have to do is to shove hard with your right foot.”

Yet, when I did exactly that, she denied she had ever said it. Fond as I am of Tish, I must admit that she has a way of forgetting things she does not wish to remember.

In the end I consented. It was against my better judgment, and I warned Tish. I have no talent for machinery, but indeed a great fear of it, since the time when as a child I was visiting my grand-aunt’s farm and almost lost a finger in a feed-cutter. In addition to that, Tish’s accident and her secret had both unnerved me. I knew that calamity faced us as I took my place at the wheel.

Tish was still in her petticoat, as we were obliged to leave her dress skirt in the tree, and Aggie was wrapped in the rug to prevent her taking cold.

“When we meet a buggy,” Tish said, “we’d better go past it rather fast. I don’t ache to be seen in a seersucker petticoat.”

“Fast,” I said, bitterly. “You’d better pray that we go past it at all.”

However, by going very slowly, I got the thing as far as the gate going into the road. Here there was a hill, and we began to move too rapidly.

“Slower,” said Tish. “You’ve got to make a turn here.”

“How?” I cried, frantically.

“Brake!” she yelled.

“Which foot?”

“Right foot. Right foot!”

However, it seems that my right foot was on the gas throttle at the time, which she had forgotten. I jammed my foot down hard, and the car seemed to lift out of the air. We went across the ditch, through a stake and rider fence, through a creek and up the other side of the bank, and brought up against a haystack with a terrific jolt.

Tish sat back and straightened her hat with a jerk.

“We’d better go back and do it again, Lizzie,” she said, “because you missed one or two things.”

“I did what you told me,” I replied, sullenly.

“Did you?” said Tish. “I don’t remember telling you to leap the creek. Of course, cross-country motoring has its advantages. Only one really should have solid tires, because barbed wire fences might be awkward.”

She then sat back and rested.

“Well?” I said.

“Well?” said Tish.

“What am I to do now?”

“Oh!” she said. “I thought you preferred doing it your own way. I don’t object, if you don’t. You are quite right. Roads do become monotonous. Only I doubt, Lizzie, if you can get over this stack. You’d better go around it.”

“Very well,” I said. “My own way is to walk home, Tish Carberry. And if you think I am going to steer a runaway automobile you can think again.”

Aggie had said nothing, but I now turned and saw her, pale and shaken, taking a sip of the blackberry cordial we always carry with us for emergencies. I suggested that she drive the thing home, but she only shook her head and muttered something about almost falling out of the back end of the car when we leaped up out of the creek. She had, she asserted, been clear up on the folded-back top, and had stayed there until the jolt against the haystack had thrown her forward into the seat again.

I daresay we would still be there had not a young man with a gun run suddenly around the haystack. He had a frightened look, but when he saw us all alive he relaxed. Unfortunately, however, Aggie still had the bottle of blackberry cordial in the air. His expression altered when he saw her, and he said, in a disgusted voice: