Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/189

Rh and sting her clouded and untalcumed young face.

When she caught sight of Luddy O'Brien, the traffic cop at the Valley Crossing, she dropped an eye to her speedometer and automatically slowed down. Quite automatically, too, she accosted that officer, after the long-established manner so disapproved of by her family, by raising her left hand to the level of her ear, holding the palm outward, and wigwagging her bunched fingers nervously up and down, very much as if she were twanging the strings of an invisible Irish harp.

Luddy grinned briefly but fraternally, saluted, and declined to commit himself, as an officer of the law, by turning to observe her as she swept past him and mounted the next hill—at a rate, be it recorded, not strictly in accordance with traffic regulations.

Teddie, in fact, was already discovering how brief and deluding can be the sense of release born of four flying wheels with nowhere in particular to fly to. She almost wished that she might hear the put-put of