"The lock on the extra wheel's rusted—you see it hasn't been undone all winter. I can't get it off."
"Well, smash it, then! We can't stay here all night."
"I haven't got anything to smash it with. I must have forgotten to put part of the tools back when I cleaned the car."
"Oh, Thomas, you are the most inefficient boy about everything except farming that I ever saw! Let me see if I can't help."
She jumped out, her feet, clad in silk stockings and satin slippers, sinking into the mud as she did so. Together for fifteen minutes, rapidly growing hot and angry, they wrestled with the refractory lock. At the end of that time they were no nearer success than they had been in the beginning.
"We'll have to crawl home on a flat tire," she said at last disgustedly;
"I hope we'll get there for breakfast."
Thomas had never seen her temper ruffled before. Her imperiousness was always sweet, and it was Heaven to be dictated to by her. The fact that he believed her to be comparing him in her mind to Austin did not help matters. Austin, as he knew very well, would have managed some way to get that tire changed. For some time they rode along in silence, the mud churning up on either side of the guards with every rod that they advanced. At last, realizing that his precious moments were slipping rapidly away, and that though, in Sylvia's present mood, it was hardly a favorable time to go on with his declaration, the morrow would be even less so, Thomas summoned up his courage once more.
"Is your back tired?" he asked. "It's awfully jolty, going over these ruts. I could steer all right with one hand, if you would let me put my other arm around you."
"You're not steering any too well as it is," remarked Sylvia tartly. "Thomas! What are you thinking of? Don't you touch me!—There, now you've done it!"
Thomas certainly had "done it." Sylvia, at his first movement, had slapped him in the face with no gentle tap. And Thomas, with only one hand on the wheel, and too amazed to keep his wits about him, had allowed the car to slide down the side of the road into the deep, muddy gutter, straight in front of the Elliotts' house.