minutes." He looked with some annoyance at the gathering crowd. "Stand
back a little, can't you?" he cried, "and give us room."
After some minutes spent in wiping greasy pieces of steel which the
chauffeur extracted, and subsequent ceaseless grinding on the crank, the
engine started again, not without a series of protesting cracks like
pistol shots. The chauffeur and Brent leaped in, the bystanders parted
with derisive cheers, and away they went through the village, only to
announce by another series of explosions a second disaster at the other
end of the street. A crowd collected there, too.
"Oh, dear!" said Honora, "don't you think we ought to take the train, Mr.
Brent? If I were to miss a dinner at my own house, it would be too
terrible!"
"There's nothing to worry about," he assured her. "Nothing broken. It's
only the igniting system that needs adjustment."
Although this was so much Greek to Honora, she was reassured. Trixton
Brent inspired confidence. There was another argument with the chauffeur,
a little more animated than the first; more greasy plugs taken out and
wiped, and a sharper exchange of compliments with the crowd; more
grinding, until the chauffeur's face was steeped in perspiration, and
more pistol shots. They were off again, but lamely, spurting a little at
times, and again slowing down to the pace of an ox-cart. Their progress
became a series of illustrations of the fable of the hare and the
tortoise. They passed horses, and the horses shied into the ditch: then
the same horses passed them, usually at the periods chosen by the demon
under the hood to fire its pistol shots, and into the ditch went the
horses once more, their owners expressing their thoughts in language at
once vivid and unrestrained.
It is one of the blessed compensations of life that in times of
prosperity we do not remember our miseries. In these enlightened days,
when everybody owns an automobile and calmly travels from Chicago to
Boston if he chooses, we have forgotten the dark ages when these machines
were possessed by devils: when it took sometimes as much as three hours
to go twenty miles, and often longer than that. How many of us have had
the same experience as Honora!
She was always going to take the train, and didn't. Whenever her mind was
irrevocably made up, the automobile whirled away on all four cylinders
for a half a mile or so, until they were out of reach of the railroad.
There were trolley cars, to be sure, but those took forever to get
anywhere. Four o'clock struck, five and six, when at last the fiend who
had conspired with fate, having accomplished his evident purpose of
compelling Honora to miss her dinner, finally abandoned them as suddenly
and mysteriously as he had come, and the automobile was a lamb once more.
It was half-past six, and the sun had set, before they saw the lights
twinkling all yellow on the heights of Fort George. At that hour the last
train they could have taken to reach the dinner-party in time was leaving
the New York side of the ferry.
"What will they think?" cried Honora. "They saw us leave Delmonico's at
two o'clock, and they didn't know we were going to Westchester."
It needed no very vivid imagination to summon up the probable remarks of
Mrs. Chandos on the affair. It was all very well to say the motor broke
down; but unfortunately Trixton Brent's reputation was not much better