“What!” thundered McDonogh.  “You’re going to leave a dummy without her clothes here on my beat?  Not if I see ye first, ye ain’t, and if ye try it on I’ll run ye in.”

“Say!  I’ll tell you what you want,” piped up the still buoyant, smart youth.  “You need one of them open taxicabs.

“He needs a hearse,” corrected the disgruntled cabman.  “Somethin’ she can lay down in comfortable an’ take in the sights through the windows.”

“Now, he needs a taxi.  He can leave her stand in the back all right, but I guess,” he warned John, “you’ll have to sit in with her and hold her head on.”

And thus it was that Maudie left the scene.  She left, too, the smart youth, the cabman and the noble, noble officer.  And as the taxi bumped over the trolley tracks she, despite all Sedyard’s efforts, turned her head and smiled out at them straight over her near-princesse back.

“Gee!” said the smart youth, “ain’t she the friendliest bunch of calico.”

“This case,” said the noble Patrolman McDonogh with unpunctual inspiration, “had ought to be looked into by rights.”

“Chauffeur,” said John Sedyard to the shadowy form before him, “just pick out the darkest streets, will you?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the chauffeur looking up into the bland smile and the outstretched hand above him.  “I’ll make it if I can but if we get stopped, don’t blame me.”

A year later, or so it seemed to John Sedyard, the taxicab, panting with indignation at the insults and interferences to which it had been subjected, turned into Sedyard’s eminently respectable block and drew up before his eminently handsome house.

He paid and propitiated the chauffeur, took his lovely burden in his arms and staggered up the steps with the half regretful feeling of one who steps out of the country of adventure back to prosaic things.  He found his latchkey, opened his door and drew Maudie into the hall.  And on the landing half-way up the stairs stood his sister Edith, evidently the bearer of some pleasant tidings.

Maudie’s smile flashed up at her from John’s shoulder.  Edith stared, stiffened, and retraced her steps.  John wheeled the figure into the reception-room and thus addressed it: 

“Listen to me, you dumbhead.  You may think this adventure is over.  Well, so did I, but I tell you now it’s only just beginning.  If you are not mighty careful you will be wrecking a home.  So keep your mouth shut,” he charged her, “and do nothing till you hear from me!”

Maudie smiled archly, coyly, confidentially, and he went upstairs.

In the sitting-room, he found gathered together his mother, his sister and Dick Van Plank, Mary’s young brother and a student at Columbia.  John was supported through Edith’s first remark and the look with which she accompanied it by the memory of her goodness to Mary and by the anticipation of the fun which Maudie might be made to provide.