Smartly tooled, with the sureness of a swallow's flight the car pursued its fan of yellow light over the intricate meander of the road, its windings, dips and soarings, while ever and again a bend ahead or the summit of some sharp ascent would take sudden shape in a sheen of spectral blue, heralding the advent of twin minor moons which, bearing down upon the brougham with a startling show of destructive mania, would pass harmlessly in a roaring rush; or some fleeting eye, crimson with anger, would be raised and over-hauled and swept astern, metamorphosed into headlights of blank glare rocking in feebly furious emulation of that headlong pace.
The buffeting air grew cooler and yet more cold; but neither the man nor the woman minded. His love warm in his arms, Lanyard was trying to live for the moment only, to be oblivious of yesterday and reckless of tomorrow. He failed, of course: impossible for one who loved so well to be deaf to the murmurings of his heart against that resolution which, shaped by his soberest judgment, firmed by his will, bade him put love away tonight forevermore, lest harm befall her in whom love had its source and whole existence. This evening together must be the last: so he was fixed in his intention. But how tell Eve, how make her understand, win her consent and concurrence? . . .
"Why do you look behind so often, Michael?"
"A bad old habit," Lanyard lightly lied, cursing his stupidity for having let her remark that symptom of a mind perturbed--"a souvenir of bad old days. Jungle folk, they say, never are wholly reclaimed from jungle ways; the instincts of the chase are always cropping up in our least considered action, we are forever conceiving ourselves, as of old, hunter, and hunted in the same skin."
"My poor Michael!" The woman indulgently laughed. "Does he imagine he is deceiving somebody?"
"But do you not forget"--he snatched at this straw--"that there are motor-cycle police abroad, even on these back-country roads? Naturally one keeps an eye out for them . . ."
For all that Eve had again contrived to put him out of countenance, there had been colour of truth in his equivocation that had failed: Lanyard's restless vigilance was more instinctive than excited by any indication either that the car was being trailed or that the riddle of his whereabouts was one of any present interest to those whose malevolence he had sound reason to beware of. Since the previous night nothing had happened to show that Morphew had succeeded in having the devious way traced which Lanyard had taken en route from Folly's residence to his own lodgings and then on to the modest hotel which ultimately had provided him with a bed, or to contradict the inference that Morphew had decided to profit by his lesson in humility and count it cheap at its cost. . . . Than which last Lanyard could not readily imagine any hope more infatuate: Life had taught him too well to know the temper of the Morphew breed.