'Miss Lethmere is always elusive,' Teddy laughed, bowing to her. 'Have you been up on your own bus, or on Eastwell's?'
'On Mr. Eastwell's. My engine did not run well, so Barnes, his mechanic, lent me his machine,' was her reply. Then, turning to me, she said: 'I went up only five minutes after you. I wonder you didn't look back when you banked over the railway line at Wheathampstead. I was just behind you then, though I could not overtake you, as my engine seemed a little sluggish.'
'That doesn't occur very often in Eastwell's bus,' remarked Teddy. 'I flew it last Thursday, and found the 150 Gnome ran perfectly.'
'Well, Claude, you outdistanced me altogether,' declared my well-beloved. 'From Hertford, with the wind behind you, you absolutely shot back. I thought that Mr. Eastwell's machine would outmatch yours, but, though I put every ounce into the engine, I was hopelessly out of it. It hadn't been tuned up well.'
'That's curious, Roseye,' I replied. 'I had no idea that my bus was any match for his! I thought that his Mertonville machine was much faster than mine—or than yours as a matter of fact.'
'To-day mine is out of the running,' she laughed.
To you, my reader, I suppose I ought to describe my own beloved Roseye. Well, I am not good at describing women. As the only son of a blunt, white-haired physician who having made expert study of all the thousand-and-one ailments of the eternal feminine, including that affection called 'nerves'—mostly the result of the drug habit, I
