‘Oughtn’t we to go faster?’ asked Catherine again, her lap full of the crimson flowers.
‘We’ll make up between Andover and London,’ said Christopher. ‘If it’s half-past nine instead of nine before we get to Hertford Street, will it be early enough?’
‘Oh, quite,’ said Catherine placidly.
They jogged along, up and down the windings of the lane, which presently grew grassier and narrower, into hollows and out of them again. Not a house was to be seen, not a human being. Stillness, evening, stars. It seemed to Catherine presently, in that wide place of rolling country and great sky, that in the whole world there was nothing except herself, Christopher, and the stars.
About seven miles beyond the hamlet of the flowering currant bush, just at the top of an incline, the motor-cycle stopped.
She thought, waking from the dream she had fallen into, that he was stopping it, as so often before that afternoon, to listen to the silence; but he hadn’t stopped it, it had stopped itself.
‘Damn,’ said Christopher, pulling and pushing and kicking certain parts of the thing.
‘Why?’ asked Catherine comfortably.
‘The engine’s stopped.’
‘Perhaps it wants winding up.’