"Brave child," he said. "Thank you."
I looked up at him, and his eyes had such a beautiful expression that a queer tenderness began stirring in my heart, just as a young bird stirs in a nest when it wakes up. I couldn't help having the impression that he felt the same thing for me at the moment. It was as if our thoughts rushed together, and then flew away in a hurry, frightened at something they'd seen. He dashed back to his tyre pumping, and I pranced away down the road to look intently at a small white stone, as if it had been a pearl of price.
Afterward I stooped and picked it up. "You're a kind of little milestone in my life," I said to it. "I think I'd like to keep you, I hardly know why." And I slipped it into the pocket of my coat.
Every sort of work that you do on a motor-car always seems to take exactly half an hour. You may think it will be twenty minutes, but you know in your heart that it will be thirty, to the last second. The people in the glass-house lost count of time after the first, through playing some ghastly kind of double dummy bridge, and as they seemed cheerful Lady Turnour and her dummy were evidently winning. But Mr. Dane did not lose count, I was sure; and when we had started again, and got a mile or two beyond Alais, he looked somewhat sternly at the mountains which no longer appeared ill-shapen. We mounted toward them over the heads of their children the foothills, and came into a region which promised wild picturesqueness. There was an extra thrill, too, because the mountains were the Cévennes, where Robert Louis Stevenson wandered with his Modestine, and slept under the stars. Judging from the gravity of the chauffeur's face he was not sure that we, too, might not have to sleep under the stars (if any), a far less care-free company than "R.L.S." and his donkey.
Sir Samuel has now exchanged cards for a Taride map, which he often studied with no particular result beyond mental satisfaction, as he generally held it upside down and got his information by contraries. But at a straggling hillside village where two roads bifurcated he suddenly became excited. Down went the window, and out popped his head.
"You go to the left here!" he shouted, as the Aigle was winging gracefully to the right.
"I think you're mistaken, sir," replied the chauffeur, stopping while the car panted reproachfully. "I know the 'Routes de France' says left, but they told me at Alais a new road had now been finished, and the old one condemned."
"Well, I'd take anything I heard there with a grain of salt," said Sir Samuel. "How should they know? Motor-cars are strange animals to them. If there were a new road the 'Routes' would give it, and I vote for the left."
"Whose car is it, anyway?" Lady Turnour was heard to murmur, not having forgiven my Fellow Worm two burst tyres and a broken chain.
Since chauffeurs should be seen and not heard, Mr. Jack Dane looked volumes and said not a word. Backing the big Aigle, who was sulking in her bonnet, he put her nose to the left. Now we were making straight, almost as the crow flies, for the Cevennes; but luckily for Lady Turnour's peace of mind the snowy tops were hidden from sight behind other mountains' shoulders as we approached. A warning chill was in the air, like the breath of a ghost; but it could not find its way through the glass; and a few cartloads of oranges which we passed opportunely looked warm and attractive, giving a delusive suggestion of the south to our road.