Her breath came quickly, and she drew her hand away.

“I suppose I ought to feel complimented,” she replied.

At this crucial instant what had been a gliding flight of the automobile became, suddenly, a more or less uneven and jerky progress, accompanied by violent explosions.  At the first of these Honora, in alarm, leaped to her feet.  And the machine, after what seemed an heroic attempt to continue, came to a dead stop.  They were on the outskirts of a village; children coming home from school surrounded them in a ring.  Brent jumped out, the chauffeur opened the hood, and they peered together into what was, to Honora, an inexplicable tangle of machinery.  There followed a colloquy, in technical French, between the master and the man.

“What’s the matter?” asked Honora, anxiously.

“Nothing much,” said Brent, “spark-plugs.  We’ll fix it up in a few 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!