Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/286

270 him when he snatched me up—a hand on either side of my waist—and swung me back into my place again.

"Little wretch!" he exclaimed. "How dare you disobey me?"

Then I was vexed, for it was ignominious to be treated as a child, when I had wanted to aid him like a comrade.

"You are very unkind—very rude," I said. "You would n't dare to do that, or speak like that to Her."

He laughed loudly. "What—haven't you forgotten 'Her?'" (As if I ever could!) "Well, I may tell you, it 's just because I did dare to 'speak like that' to a woman, that I 'm a chauffeur stuck in the snow with another man's car, and the ⸺"

"The rest is another epithet which concerns me, I suppose," I remarked with dignity, though suddenly I felt the chill of the icy air far, far more cruelly than I had felt it yet. I was so cold, in this white desolation, that it seemed I must die soon. And it would n't matter at all if I were buried under the drifts, to be found in the late spring with violets growing out of the places where my eyes once had been.

"Yes," said he, in that cool way he has, which can be as irritating as a chilblain. "It was an epithet concerning you, but luckily for me I stopped to think before I spoke—an accomplishment I 'm only just beginning to learn."

I swallowed something much harder and bigger than a cannon ball, and said nothing.

"Of course you 're covered with snow up to your knees, foolish child!" He was glaring ferociously at me.

"It doesn't matter."