“I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when the right-hand cylinder began to miss a little.  Then, after a while, the left started to skip, too.  I stopped under a tree to look for the trouble and pulled up the bonnet.  The spark-plugs were badly carbonized, and when I had seen to them and had put the captain on the crank, we could only get explosions at intervals.  There was good compression; everything was lubricating nicely; no heating or sticking anywhere—­but the engine had lain down on us.  The captain was so angry he wouldn’t speak a word to me, and mumbled red-hot things to himself under his breath.  Guess how I felt.  But he was too much of a gentleman not to crank—­and so he cranked and cranked and still nothing happened.  I chased a whole row of things one after another—­battery, buzzer, oil or gasoline in the cylinders, defective insulation, commutator, water in the carburettor, choked feed-pipe,—­and all it did was to cough in a dreary, tow-me-home-to-mother sort of way,

“If the captain had known anything about engines and could have made it start, I expect I would have married him and lived happy ever afterward.  It was just his Heaven-sent chance to win out and show he was the right man for the place.  But he didn’t know enough to run a phonograph and began to talk about getting towed home, and how if he ever bought a machine it would be electric.  If I had been out of patience with him before, imagine what I felt then!  He said he knew all the time I was driving too fast and hurting something, and thought he had proved it by the cylinders being hot—­as though they aren’t always hot.  It was awful how stupid he was and helpless and disagreeable.  He couldn’t even crank properly and the engine back-fired on him and hurt his hand.  Finally I got so desperate that I sat down and cried, while he nursed his hand and said we ought to desert the machine and go home, and that papa would be anxious if we didn’t turn up to lunch.  I knew all the time he was talking about his lunch.  You don’t know what an Englishman is if he isn’t fed regularly, and it was now after one and we were eighteen miles from High Court.

“But I wasn’t the girl to give up the ship.  As long as there weren’t any fractures or things stuck together I knew the expert could have made it go—­and if the expert, why not I?  If the captain hadn’t flurried me with all the silly things he said, I believe I would have ferreted out the trouble all right.  But I was so cross and tired and disgusted that my brain was stalled as well as the Manton, and so I gave up for a little while and wouldn’t even answer the captain when he spoke to me.

“Oh, yes, we were pigs, both of us, he in his way and I in mine; and the sun went down and down, and it didn’t make me feel any better to think that I was smudged all over with grease, and that my hands and nails were something awful—­while if ever there was a galley-slave at the oar, it was the Honorable John Vincent Cartwright cranking.