“Anywhere out of my way,” she replied with a severity which the corners of her sensitive mouth were finding it hard to live up to.

“Behold me eliminated, deleted, expunged,” he declared humbly.  “But first let me explain that when I told my idiot chauffeur to give ’em—­that is, to hold his ground, I didn’t know who you were.”

She wrinkled dainty brows at him.  “Well, you don’t know who I am now, do you?”

“I don’t have to,” he responded with fervor.  “Just on sight you may have all of this street and as many of the adjoining avenues as you can use.  By the way, who are you?” The question was put with an expression of sweet and innocent simplicity.

The girl looked at him hard and straight.  “I don’t think that introductions are necessary.”

He sighed outrageously.  “They Met but to Part; Laura Jean Libbey; twenty-fourth large edition,” he murmured.  “And I was just about to present myself as Martin Dyke, vagrant, but harmless, and very much at your service.  However, I perceive with pain that it is, indeed, my move.  May I help you up to the wheel of your ship?  I infer that you intend driving yourself.”

“I’ll have to, if I’m to get anywhere.”  A look of dismay overspread her piquant face.  “Oh, dear!  I don’t in the least understand this machinery.  I can’t drive this kind of car.”

“Glory be!” exclaimed Mr. Dyke.  “I mean, that’s too bad,” he amended gracefully.  “Won’t you let me take you where you want to go?”

“What’ll become of your van, then?  Besides, I haven’t any idea where I want to go.”

“What!  Are you, too, like myself, a wandering home-seeker on the face of an overpopulated earth, Miss?”

The “Miss” surprised her.  Why the sudden lapse on the part of this extraordinary and self-confident young person into the terminology of the servant class?

“Yes, I am,” she admitted.

“A hundred thousand helpless babes in the wood,” he announced sonorously, “are wandering about, lost and homeless on this melancholy and moving day of October 1st, waiting for the little robins to come and bury them under the brown and withered leaves.  Ain’t it harrowing, Miss!  Personally I should prefer to have the last sad dirge sung over me by a quail on toast, or maybe a Welsh rabbit.  What time did you breakfast, Miss?  I had a ruined egg at six-fifteen.”

The girl surrendered to helpless and bewildered laughter.  “You ask the most personal questions as if they were a matter of course.”

“By way of impressing you with my sprightly and entertaining individuality, so that you will appreciate the advantages to be derived from my continued acquaintance, and grapple me to your soul with hooks of steel, as Hamlet says.  Or was it Harold Bell Wright?  Do you care for reading, Miss?  I’ve got a neat little library inside, besides an automatic piano and a patent ice-box....  By the way, Miss, is that policeman doing setting-up exercises or motioning us to move on? I think he is.”