As they were approaching the long stretch of straight road to which King had looked forward an hour ago, but which he was disgusted to find himself actually rather dreading now, a great closed car of luxurious type, and bearing upon its top considerable travelling luggage, slowed down as it neared, and a liveried chauffeur held up a detaining hand.  Burns stopped to answer a series of questions as to the best route toward a neighbouring city.  There were matters of road mending and detours to be made plain to the inquirers, so the detention occupied a full five minutes, during which the chauffeur got down and came to Burns’s side with a road map, with which the two wrestled after the fashion usually made necessary by such aids to travel.

During this period Jordan King underwent a disturbing experience.  Looking up with his usual keen glance, one trained to observe whatever might be before it, he took in at a sweep the nature of the party in the big car.  That it was a rich man’s car, and that its occupants were those who naturally belonged in it, there was no question.  From the owner himself, an aristocrat who looked the part, as not all aristocrats do, to those who were presumably his wife, his son, and daughters, all were of the same type.  Simply dressed as if for a long journey, they yet diffused that aroma of luxury which cannot be concealed.

The presumable son, a tall, hawk-nosed young man who sat beside the chauffeur, turned to speak to those inside, and King’s glance followed his.  He thus caught sight of a profile next the open window and close by him.  He stared at it, his heart suddenly standing still.  Who was this girl with the bronze-red hair, the perfect outline of nose and mouth and chin, the sea-shell colouring?  Even as he stared she turned her head, and her eyes looked straight into his.

He had seen Miss Anne Linton only twice, and on the two occasions she had seemed to him like two entirely different girls.  But this girl—­was she not that one who had come to visit him in his room at the hospital, full of returning health and therefore of waxing beauty and vigour?

For one instant he was sure it was she, no matter how strange it was that she should be here, in this rich man’s car—­unless—­But he had no time to think it out before he was overwhelmed by the indubitable evidence that, whoever this girl was, she did not know him.  Her eyes—­apparently the same wonderful eyes which he could now never forget—­looked into his without a sign of recognition, and her colour—­the colour of radiantly blooming youth—­did not change perceptibly under his gaze.  And after that one glance, in which she seemed to survey him closely, after the manner of girls, as if he were an interesting specimen, her eyes travelled to Red Pepper Burns and rested lightly on him, as if he, too, were a person of but passing significance to the motor traveller looking for diversion after many dusty miles of more or less monotonous sights.