"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some modern version of Elysium.
So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.
The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.
Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny, old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.
She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't be Brooklands?
"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"
"What is it?" she asked.
He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong? Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever did do! Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"
He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.
Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again, fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....