“What can they mean?” she cried out in a kind of temper; “this car’s going like a snail.”

There was a short silence, and then Turnbull said:  “It is certainly very odd, you are driving quietly enough.”

“You are driving nobly,” said MacIan, and his words (which had no meaning whatever) sounded hoarse and ungainly even in his own ears.

They passed the next mile and a half swiftly and smoothly; yet among the many things which they passed in the course of it was a clump of eager policemen standing at a cross-road.  As they passed, one of the policemen shouted something to the others; but nothing else happened.  Eight hundred yards farther on, Turnbull stood up suddenly in the swaying car.

“My God, MacIan!” he called out, showing his first emotion of that night.  “I don’t believe it’s the pace; it couldn’t be the pace.  I believe it’s us.”

MacIan sat motionless for a few moments and then turned up at his companion a face that was as white as the moon above it.

“You may be right,” he said at last; “if you are, I must tell her.”

“I will tell the lady if you like,” said Turnbull, with his unconquered good temper.

“You!” said MacIan, with a sort of sincere and instinctive astonishment.  “Why should you—­no, I must tell her, of course——­”

And he leant forward and spoke to the lady in the fur cap.

“I am afraid, madam, that we may have got you into some trouble,” he said, and even as he said it it sounded wrong, like everything he said to this particular person in the long gloves.  “The fact is,” he resumed, desperately, “the fact is, we are being chased by the police.”  Then the last flattening hammer fell upon poor Evan’s embarrassment; for the fluffy brown head with the furry black cap did not turn by a section of the compass.

“We are chased by the police,” repeated MacIan, vigorously; then he added, as if beginning an explanation, “You see, I am a Catholic.”

The wind whipped back a curl of the brown hair so as to necessitate a new theory of aesthetics touching the line of the cheek-bone; but the head did not turn.

“You see,” began MacIan, again blunderingly, “this gentleman wrote in his newspaper that Our Lady was a common woman, a bad woman, and so we agreed to fight; and we were fighting quite a little time ago—­but that was before we saw you.”

The young lady driving her car had half turned her face to listen; and it was not a reverent or a patient face that she showed him.  Her Norman nose was tilted a trifle too high upon the slim stalk of her neck and body.

When MacIan saw that arrogant and uplifted profile pencilled plainly against the moonshine, he accepted an ultimate defeat.  He had expected the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so much as this.

“You see,” said the stumbling spokesman, “I was angry with him when he insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but the police are all trying to stop it.”