“Not in the least,” said Pat more graciously still. Inwardly she was furious. She had promised herself a pleasant leisurely drive home through the golden August evening, over a certain little back road where nobody ever went and where there were such delicious things to see. Pat knew all the roads home from town and liked each for some peculiar charm. But now everything was spoiled. Well, she would go by the regular road and get home as soon as she could. She made the car screech violently as she rounded the first corner. It seemed to express her feelings.

“Don’t let’s go home by this road,” said Suzanne softly. “There’s so much traffic…and it’s so straight. A straight road is an abomination, don’t you think? I like lovely turns around curves of ferns and spruce…and little dips into brooky hollows…and the things the car lights pick up as you turn corners, starting out at you in the undergrowth like fairy folk taken by surprise.”

“A thunderstorm is coming up,” said Pat, more graciously every time she spoke.

“Oh, well out-race it. Let us take the road out from that street. David and I went by that last week…it’s a dear, lost, bewitching road.”

Oh, didn’t she know it! Pat turned the car so abruptly in the direction of the back road that she narrowly avoided a collision. How dare Suzanne Kirk, who had called Silver Bush queer, like that road? It was an insult. She hated to have Suzanne Kirk like anything she liked. Well, the road was rough and rutty…and the thunderstorm was an excuse for driving fast. Suzanne Kirk should have a good bumpy drive that would cure her of her liking for back roads.

Pat did not talk or try to talk. Neither, after a few futile attempts, did Suzanne. They were about halfway home when the latter said, with a tinge of alarm in her voice,

“The storm is coming up rather quickly, isn’t it?”

Pat had been grimly aware of that for some time. It was growing dark. Huge menacing black masses were piling up in the northwest in the teeth of a rapidly rising wind. This was a frightful road to be on in a rain…narrow and twisting, with reedy ditches on either side. Curves and dips and startled fairy folk were all very well in fine weather, but in wind and rain and darkness…and all three seemed to envelop them at once…a wall of black…an ocean of driving rain…a howl of tempest…a blue-white flare of lightning…a deafening crash of thunder...and then disaster. The car had swerved on the suddenly greasy road and the next moment they were in the ditch.