“That’s all right,” said Ruddy, terribly embarrassed.  “You’ve always been awful good to my folks.  I’m glad we done it!  Good-night!” Then Ruddy had turned back for the walk home in the streaming blackness, and Rachael, drawing a deep breath, was on her way again.  She stopped only for a quick question to Mary.

“No change?”

“Just the same.”

The wet miles flew by; rain beat untiringly against the curtains, slished in two great feathers of water from under the rushing wheels.  Rachael watched her speedometer; twenty-five—­twenty-eight—­thirty—­they could not do better than that in this weather.  And they had a hundred miles to go.

But that hundred was only eighty-six now, only eighty.  Villages flew by, and men came out and stood on the dripping porches of crossroad stores to marvel as the long scream of Rachael’s horn cut through the night air.  Twenty minutes past eight o’clock—­ eight minutes of nine o’clock.  The little villages began to grow dark.

There was nothing to pass on the road; so much was gain.  Except in the villages, and once or twice where a slow, rattling wagon was plodding along on the wet mirror-like asphalt, Rachael might make her own speed.  The road lay straight, and was an exceptionally good road, even in this weather.  She need hardly pause for signboards.  The rain still fell in sheets.  Seventy-two miles to go.

“How is he, Mary?”

“The same, Mrs. Gregory.  Except that he gives a little groan now and then—­when it shakes him!”

“My boy!  But not sleeping?” “Oh, no, Mrs. Gregory.  He just lies quiet like.”

“God bless him!” Rachael said under her breath.  Aloud she said:  “Millie, couldn’t you lean over, and watch him a few minutes, and see what you think?”

Then they were flying on again.  Rachael began to wonder just how long the run was.  They always carelessly called it “a hundred miles.”  But was it really a hundred and two, or ninety-eight?  What a difference two or three miles would make to-night!  She fell into a nervous shiver; suppose they reached the bridge, and then Mary should touch her arm.  “He doesn’t look right, Mrs. Gregory!” Suppose that for the little boy that they finally carried into New York there was no longer any hope.  Her little Derry—­

The child that might have been the joy of a happy home, that might have grown to a dignified inheritance of the love and tenderness that had been between his father and mother.  Robbed in his babyhood, taken away from the father he adored, and now—­this!  Sixty-one miles to go.

“Detour to New York.”  The sign, with all its hideous import, rose before her suddenly.  No help for it; she must lose one or two, perhaps a dozen miles, she must give up the good road for a bad one.  She must lose her way, too, perhaps.  Had Kane gone over this road yesterday?  It was much farther on that she had spoken to Kane.  Perhaps he had, but she could not remember, doubt made every foot of the way terrible to Rachael.  She could only plunge on, over rocks, over bumps, into mud-holes.  She could only blindly take what seemed of two turnings the one most probably right.