Hutchins rudely started the car before he had finished; but he ignored her and waved a cordial farewell to the rest of us.

“Bring as many as you like,” he called.  “Sunday is a good day.  Ask Miss—­Miss Hutchins to come out and bring some friends along.”

We drove back at the most furious rate.  Tish was at last compelled to remonstrate with Hutchins.

“Not only are we going too fast,” she said, “but you were really rude to that nice young man.”

“I wish I had turned the hose on him and drowned him!” said Hutchins between her teeth.

II

Hutchins brought a newspaper to Tish the next morning at breakfast, and Tish afterwards said her expression was positively malevolent in such a young and pretty woman.

The newspaper said that an attempt had been made to rob the Newcomb place the night before, but that the thieves had apparently secured nothing but a package of oatmeal and a tin sprinkling-can, which they had abandoned on the lawn.  Some color, however, was lent to the fear that they had secured an amount of money, from the fact that a silver half-dollar had been found on the window sill of a tool-house.  The Newcomb family was at its summer home on the Maine coast.

“You see,” Hutchins said to Tish, “that man didn’t belong there at all.  He was just impertinent and—­laughing in his sleeve.”

Tish was really awfully put out, having planned to take the Sunday school there for a picnic.  She was much pleased, however, at Hutchins’s astuteness.

“I shall take her along to Canada,” she said to me.  “The girl has instinct, which is better than reason.  Her subconsciousness is unusually active.”

Looking back, as I must, and knowing now all that was in her small head while she whistled about the car, or all that was behind her smile, one wonders if women really should have the vote.  So many of them are creatures of sex and guile.  A word from her would have cleared up so much, and she never spoke it!

Well, we spent most of July in getting ready to go.  Charlie Sands said the mosquitoes and black flies would be gone by August, and we were in no hurry.

We bought a good tent, with a diagram of how to put it up, some folding camp-beds, and a stove.  The day we bought the tent we had rather a shock, for as we left the shop the suburban youth passed us.  We ignored him completely, but he lifted his hat.  Hutchins, who was waiting in Tish’s car, saw him, too, and went quite white with fury.

Shortly after that, Hannah came in one night and said that a man was watching Tish’s windows.  We thought it was imagination, and Tish gave her a dose of sulphur and molasses—­her liver being sluggish.

“Probably an Indian, I dare say,” was Tish’s caustic comment.

In view of later developments, however, it is a pity we did not investigate Hannah’s story; for Aggie, going home from Tish’s late one night in Tish’s car, had a similar experience, declaring that a small machine had followed them, driven by a heavy-set man with a mustache.  She said, too, that Hutchins, swerving sharply, had struck the smaller machine a glancing blow and almost upset it.