So, groping for the relief of action, some method of spanning that nine hours’ wait, her eye fell upon a card tucked beside the telephone case.  She held it between, finger and thumb, her brows puckered.

    TAXIS AND TOURING CARS
    Anywhere . . .  Anytime

She took down the receiver again and asked for Seymour 9X.

“Western Taxi,” a man’s voice drawled.

“I want to reach Roaring Hot Springs in the shortest time possible,” she told him rather breathlessly.  “Can you furnish me a machine and a reliable chauffeur?”

“Roaring Springs?” he repeated.  “How many passengers?”

“One.  Myself.”

“Just a minute.”

She heard a faint burble of talk away at the other end of the wire.  Then the same voice speaking crisply.

“We gotta big six roadster, and a first-class driver.  It’ll cost you seventy-five dollars—­in advance.”

“Your money will be waiting for you here,” she answered calmly.  “How soon can you bring the car around to the Hotel Granada?”

“In ten minutes, if you say so.”

“Say twenty minutes, then.”

“All right.”

She dressed herself, took the elevator down to the lobby, instructed the night clerk to have a maid pack her trunk and send it by express to Hopyard, care of St. Allwoods Hotel on the lake.  Then she walked out to the broad-stepped carriage entrance.

A low-hung long-hooded, yellow car stood there, exhaust purring faintly.  She paid the driver, sank into the soft upholstering beside him, and the big six slid out into the street.  There was no traffic.  In a few minutes they were on the outskirts of the city, the long asphalt ribbon of King’s Way lying like a silver band between green, bushy walls.  They crossed the last car track.  The driver spoke to her out of one corner of his mouth.

“Wanna make time, huh?”

“I want to get to Roaring Lake as quickly as you can drive, without taking chances.”

“I know the road pretty well,” he assured her.  “Drove a party clear to Rosebud day before yesterday.  I’ll do the best I can.  Can’t drive too fast at night.  Too smoky.”

She could not gage his conception of real speed if the gait he struck was not “too fast.”  They were through New Westminster and rolling across the Fraser bridge before she was well settled in the seat, breasting the road with a lurch and a swing at the curves, a noise under that long hood like giant bees in an empty barrel.

Ninety miles of road good, bad and indifferent, forest and farm and rolling hill, and the swamps of Sumas Prairie, lies between Vancouver and Roaring Lake.  At four in the morning, with dawn an hour old, they woke the Rosebud ferryman to cross the river.  Twenty minutes after that Stella was stepping stiffly out of the machine before Roaring Springs hospital.  The doctor’s Chinaman was abroad in the garden.  She beckoned him.