Club-house, waving handkerchiefs and all vanished from Kate's view.
"Faster, Herrick," she commanded, leaning forward, "I must be home by half past five." Again he nodded, and notched spark and throttle down.

The car, leaping like a wild creature, began to hum at a swift clip along the smooth, white road toward Newburgh on the Hudson.
Thirty miles an hour the speedometer showed, then thirty-five and forty.
Again the drunken chauffeur, still master of his machine despite the poison pulsing in his dazed brain, snicked the little levers further down.

Forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, the figures on the dial showed.
Now the exhaust ripped in a crackling staccato, like a machine gun, as the chauffeur threw out the muffler.

Behind, a long trail of dust rose, whirling in the air.

Catherine, a sportswoman born, leaned back and smiled with keen pleasure, while her yellow veil, whipping sharply on the wind, let stray locks of that wonderful red-gold hair stream about her flushed face.
Thus she sped homeward, driven at a mad race by a man whose every sense was numbed and stultified by alcohol--homeward, along a road up which, far, far away, another man, keen, sober and alert, was trudging with a knapsack on his broad back, swinging a stick and whistling cheerily as he went.
Fate, that strange moulder of human destinies, what had it in store for these two, this woman and this man?
This daughter of a billionaire, and this young proletarian?
Who could foresee, or, foreseeing, could believe what even now stood written on the Book of Destiny?
.