“A motor,” he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. “If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles—light of some sort. The engines wouldn’t rust, but they’d clog. It must be paraffin. We daren’t clean with petrol by artificial light. It’s possible. Let’s try....”
That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea.
“The Solent,” said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them.
On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist.
“She’ll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going,” said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm.