I expected to be (to put it mildly) as uncomfortable as I had been before my short respite, yet strange to say, this was not the case.  I did not know what was the matter with me, but suddenly I seemed to be enjoying myself.  The tension of muscles relaxed, as if a string which had held them tight—­like the limbs of a Jumping Jack—­had been let go.  I leaned back against the crimson cushions of my seat with a new and singular sense of well-being.  Once, as a volunteer in South Africa, I had felt the same when, after having a splinter of bone taken out, under chloroform, I had waked up to be told it was all over.  This wasn’t over, but somehow, I didn’t want it to be.

We took Putney Bridge at a gulp, and swallowed the long hill to Wimbledon Common in the fashion of a hungry anaconda; but before we arrived at this stage a thing happened which unexpectedly raised my opinion of motor cars.  It was in the Fullham Road that we glided close behind a hansom bowling along at a rattling pace.  Traffic on our right prevented us from passing, and Molly had just remarked how vexing it was to be kept back by a mere hansom, when plunk! down went the little nag on his nose.  It was one of those tumbles in which the horse collapses in a limp heap without any sliding, though he had been going fast downhill, and of course the hansom stopped dead.  The whole scene was as quick as the flashing of a biograph.  The driver struggled to keep his seat, clawing at the shiny roof of the cab; his fare, in a silk hat and pathetic frock coat, shot from the vehicle like a flying Mercury, and this time it seemed that nothing could keep us from telescoping the vehicle thus suddenly arrested a few feet ahead.

But I reckoned without Molly.  Her little gloved hand, and the high-heeled American toys she had for feet, moved like lightning.  Without any violent wrench, the car stopped apparently in less than its own length, and as, even thus, we were too close upon the cab, Molly threw a quick glance behind, then bade Mercedes glide gently backward.

With the fall of the horse, Jack rose in the tonneau, with the instinct of protection over Molly.  But he said not a word till she had guided the car to safety, when he gave her a little congratulatory pat on the shoulder.  “Good girl; that was perfect.  Couldn’t have been better,” he murmured.  We waited until we had seen that neither man nor horse was badly hurt, and then sped on again, with a certain respect for the motor rankling in my reluctant heart.  Comparing its behaviour with that of an automobile, Hansom’s ironically named “Patent Safety” had not a wheel to stand upon.