‘Would you!’ cried Ellis authoritatively, and touched her with the whip (he had forgotten the handbook).

He scarcely touched her, but you never know where you are with any horse.  That mare, which had been a mirror of all the virtues all the afternoon, was off like a rocket.  She overtook an electric car as if it had been standing still.  Ellis sawed her mouth; he might as well have sawed the funnel of a locomotive.  He had meant to turn off and traverse Bursley by secluded streets, but he perceived that safety lay solely in letting her go straight ahead up the very steep slope of Oldcastle Street into the middle of the town.  It would be an amazing mare that galloped to the top of Oldcastle Street!  She galloped nearly to the top, and then Ellis began to get hold of her a bit.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said masculinely to Ada.

And, conscious of victory, he jerked the mare to the left to avoid an approaching car....

The next instant they were anchored against the roots of a lamp-post.  When Ellis saw the upper half of the lamp-post bent down at right angles, and pieces of glass covering the pavement, he could not believe that he and his dogcart had done that, especially as neither the mare, nor the dogcart, nor its freight, was damaged.  The machine was merely jammed, and the mare, satisfied, stood quiet, breathing rapidly.

But Ada Jenkins was crying.

And the car stopped a moment to observe.  And then a number of chapel-goers on their way to the Sytch Chapel, which the Carter family still faithfully attended, joined the scene; and then a policeman.

Ellis sat like a stuck pig in the dogcart.  He knew that speech was demanded of him, but he did not know where to begin.

The worst thing of all was the lamp-post, bent, moveless, unnatural, atrociously comic, accusing him.

The affair was over the town in a minute; the next morning it reached Llandudno.  Ellis Carter had been out on the spree with a Wakes girl in a dogcart on Sunday afternoon, and had got into such a condition that he had driven into a lamp-post at the top of Oldcastle Street just as people were going into chapel.

The lamp-post remained bent for three days—­a fearful warning to all dogs that doggishness has limits.

If it had not been a dogcart, and such a high, green dogcart; if it had been, say, a brougham, or even a cab!  If it had not been Sunday!  And, granting Sunday, if it had not been just as people were going into chapel!  If he had not chosen that particular lamp-post, visible both from the market-place and St. Luke’s Square!  If he had only contrived to destroy a less obtrusive lamp-post in some unfrequented street!  And if it had not been a Wakes girl—­if the reprobate had only selected for his guilty amours an actress from one of the touring companies, or even a star from the Hanbridge Empire—­yea, or even a local barmaid!  But a Wakes girl!