At last, after many stops at little lonely stations they arrived at Trehenna.  The guard opened the door and they stepped out on to the snow-covered platform.  An oil lamp hung from the tiny pent-house roof that, structurally, was Trehenna Station.  They looked around at the silent gloom of white undulating moorland, and it seemed a place where no man lived and only ghosts could have a bleak and unsheltered being.  A porter came up and helped the guard with the luggage.  Then they realized that the station was built on a small embankment, for, looking over the railing, they saw below the two great lamps of a motor car.  A fur-clad chauffeur met them at the bottom of the stairs.  He clapped his hands together and informed them cheerily that he had been waiting for four hours.  It was the bitterest winter in these parts within the memory of man, said he, and he himself had not seen snow there for five years.  Then he settled the three travellers in the great roomy touring car covered with a Cape-cart hood, wrapped them up in many rugs and started.

After a few moments, the huddling together of their bodies—­for, the Professor being a spare man, there was room for them all on the back seat—­the pile of rugs, the serviceable and all but air-tight hood, induced a pleasant warmth and a pleasant drowsiness.  Where they were being driven they knew not.  The perfectly upholstered seat eased their limbs, the easy swinging motion of the car soothed their spirits.  They felt that already they had reached the luxuriously appointed home which, after all, they knew awaited them.  McCurdie no longer railed, Professor Biggleswade forgot the dangers of bronchitis, and Lord Doyne twisted the stump of a black cigar between his lips without any desire to relight it.  A tiny electric lamp inside the hood made the darkness of the world to right and left and in front of the talc windows still darker.  McCurdie and Biggleswade fell into a doze.  Lord Doyne chewed the end of his cigar.  The car sped on through an unseen wilderness.

Suddenly there was a horrid jolt and a lurch and a leap and a rebound, and then the car stood still, quivering like a ship that has been struck by a heavy sea.  The three men were pitched and tossed and thrown sprawling over one another onto the bottom of the car.  Biggleswade screamed.  McCurdie cursed.  Doyne scrambled from the confusion of rugs and limbs and, tearing open the side of the Cape-cart hood, jumped out.  The chauffeur had also just leaped from his seat.  It was pitch dark save for the great shaft of light down the snowy road cast by the acetylene lamps.  The snow had ceased falling.

“What’s gone wrong?”

“It sounds like the axle,” said the chauffeur ruefully.

He unshipped a lamp and examined the car, which had wedged itself against a great drift of snow on the off side.  Meanwhile McCurdie and Biggleswade had alighted.

“Yes, it’s the axle,” said the chauffeur.