The chauffeur at this point felt it incumbent upon him to avert a quarrel, so he offered the cheering assurance that it was only four forty-five, and he could get most anywhere in fifteen minutes.  But even as he spoke there was an ominous report, followed by the unmistakable sound of escaping air.

“Oh, I say!” cried Percival in tones of horror, “not a puncture?”

“That’s whut!” said the chauffeur, who had jammed on the brakes, and was now ruefully inspecting a back wheel.

“Can’t stop for that!” cried Percival, impatiently.  “Every second counts, my man.  Doesn’t matter how much we bounce so long as we get there.”

“But I ain’t goin’ to ruin my tire.”

“What the deuce do I care about your confounded old tire?  I’ll pay for it.  I’ll pay you anything you ask if you get me to the dock on time.”

But after bumping furiously from cobblestone to cobblestone, the chauffeur rebelled and positively declined to go farther until the tire was changed.

“Then it’s up to us to catch a streetcar!” cried Bobby, “What luck!  Here comes one now.  They only run once a week.”

“Street-car?  Oh, you mean a tram.  To be sure!  Hadn’t thought of it.  Shall we run for it?”

Thrusting a gold piece into the hand of the chauffeur, he made a fifty-yard dash for the corner that did credit to his early training.  But the imperious signal with which he hailed the car was not heeded.  Instead, a fat conductor leaned from the rear platform and obligingly volunteered the information that he was on the wrong corner.

“Intolerable insolence!” muttered Percival to Bobby, who had just come up.  “What are you laughing at?”

“At your face when the car went by.  Here comes a wagon.  Quick!  Ask the man if he can’t take us the rest of the way.”

“But we can’t ride in a—­”

“Yes, we can.  We can ride on a broom-stick if we have to.  Hurry!”

Percival plunged obediently into the street and made his request.  He was meeting with little encouragement from the driver, who evidently thought he was mentally unsound, when Bobby came to his rescue.  It was only by resorting to some of those feminine tricks of persuasion which the suffragists assure us are quite immoral that she succeeded in carrying her point.

Ten minutes later the curiosity of the main thoroughfare of Honolulu was raised to fever-heat by the singular spectacle of an austere and distinguished-looking Englishman and a pretty, if somewhat disheveled, young girl dangling their feet from the end of a dilapidated wagon that was being driven at a breakneck speed toward the wharf.

[Illustration:  At a breakneck speed towards the wharf]

For once in his life Percival was indifferent to appearances.  Everything else sank into insignificance beside the one supreme necessity of catching that steamer.  There would not be another sailing for the Orient for ten days.  The prospect of ten days in this lotus-land alone with a perilously pretty girl who had evidently taken an enormous fancy to him filled him with alarm.  What possible explanation could he offer to Sister Cordelia, that august representative of the family waiting in Hong-Kong to minister to his broken and bleeding heart?