“Luck!” he cried derisively.  “Skill!  I wish I had a dollar for every one I got when I was learning to drive.  There was a farmer over here in Chester—­” and he proceeded to relate how he had had to pay for two turkeys.  “He got my number, the old hayseed, he was laying for me, and the next time I went back that way he held me up for five dollars.  I can remember the time when a man in a motor was an easy mark for every reuben in the county.  They got rich on us.”

She responded to his mood, which was wholly irresponsible, exuberant, and they laughed together like children, every little incident assuming an aspect irresistibly humorous.  Once he stopped to ask an old man standing in his dooryard how far it was to Kingsbury.

“Wal, mebbe it’s two mile, they mostly call it two,” said the patriarch, after due reflection, gathering his beard in his band.  “Mebbe it’s more.”  His upper lip was blue, shaven, prehensile.

“What did you ask him for, when you know?” said Janet, mirthfully, when they had gone on, and Ditmar was imitating him.  Ditmar’s reply was to wink at her.  Presently they saw another figure on the road.

“Let’s see what he’ll say,” Ditmar proposed.  This man was young, the colour of mahogany, with glistening black hair and glistening black eyes that regarded the too palpable joyousness of their holiday humour in mute surprise.

“I no know—­stranger,” he said.

“No speaka Portugueso?” inquired Ditmar, gravely.

“The country is getting filthy with foreigners,” he observed, when he had started the car.  “I went down to Plymouth last summer to see the old rock, and by George, it seemed as if there wasn’t anybody could speak American on the whole cape.  All the Portuguese islands are dumped there —­cranberry pickers, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Janet.

“Sure thing!” he exclaimed.  “And when I got there, what do you think? there was hardly enough of the old stone left to stand on, and that had a fence around it like an exhibit in an exposition.  It had all been chipped away by souvenir hunters.”

She gazed at him incredulously.

“You don’t believe me!  I’ll take you down there sometime.  And another thing, the rock’s high and dry—­up on the land.  I said to Charlie Crane, who was with me, that it must have been a peach of a jump for old Miles Standish and Priscilla what’s her name.”

“How I’d love to see the ocean again!” Janet exclaimed.

“Why, I’ll take you—­as often as you like,” he promised.  “We’ll go out on it in summer, up to Maine, or down to the Cape.”

Her enchantment was now so great that nothing seemed impossible.

“And we’ll go down to Plymouth, too, some Sunday soon, if this weather keeps up.  If we start early enough we can get there for lunch, easy.  We’ll see the rock.  I guess some of your ancestors must have come over with that Mayflower outfit—­first cabin, eh?  You look like it.”