“Are you ready?” she asked eagerly. “There’s a regular moor mist coming on. The sooner we start the better.”
He looked at her oddly. He was rather pale and his eyes were curiously bright.
“The car won’t budge,” he said. “I’ve been tinkering at her all this time to no purpose.”
Jean stared at him, a vague apprehension of disagreeable possibilities presenting itself to her mind. Their predicament would be an extremely awkward one if the car remained recalcitrant!
“Won’t budge?” she repeated. “But you must make it budge, Geoffrey. We can’t—we can’t stay here! What’s gone wrong with it?”
Burke launched out into a string of technicalities which left Jean with a confused feeling that the mechanism of a motor must be an invention of the devil designed expressly for the chastening of human nature, but from which she succeeded in gathering the bare skeleton fact that something had gone radically wrong with the car’s running powers.
Her apprehensions quickened.
“What are we to do?” she asked blankly.
“Make the best of a bad job—and console each other,” he suggested lightly.
She frowned a little. It did not seem to her quite the moment for jesting.