"Confound it! That's a breakdown at the works. I shall have to go. I'll put you on your road home, and then, if you'll excuse me, I'll make a bee line for the works."
"You need not trouble about me," she said. "You seem to forget that I piloted you through the woods when you couldn't see your hand before your face."
He hesitated; the trouble at the works called to him like a siren. As a result of many years of habit, other things seemed to fade into temporary insignificance.
"Are you quite sure you don't mind?" he asked.
"Quite," she answered.
Something in her tone seemed to warn him, but he didn't quite grasp the situation. His brain seemed clogged, the siren of groaning engines and flashing fuses seemed to hold his mind enthralled. He held out his hand.
"Good-bye."
She took it coldly. "Good-bye," she said, and turned and was swallowed up in the darkness.
At the bottom of the street Carstairs jumped into a hansom and dashed up to the works shortly after the breakdown had occurred. He found the shift engineer (a very young man with a very young moustache) trying to do fourteen different things at once, and incidentally, by vigorous tugging, endangering the very existence of the moustache. When a breakdown happens at an electric lighting station, it is the lot of the shift engineer to be called upon to do fourteen different things at once. In the first place, various fools, in various parts of the town, ring up on the telephone to tell him the lights are out: as if he were not painfully aware of it at the start, for it may be taken as an axiom, that when the lights are out in the town, they are very much in in the works; then the engine-drivers get flurried at the unusual display of fireworks around their engines; the switchboard attendant (who is usually a budding shift engineer) makes a frantic grab for the wrong switch and jerks it out, making confusion worse confounded; then the stokers get excited because their boilers are blowing off like to burst and they can't see the water in them; and at the finish of all when the poor shift (usually a very young man) is priding himself on getting rather well out of a tight place, the chief (usually also a very young man) rings up to ask why in thunder he did not do something altogether different, or why he did not do what he did in much quicker time, or else waits till next morning and harshly asks why the shift engineer had not arrived, in a small fraction of a minute, at the same idea of what was best, that he, the chief, had, after a night's rest and a few hours' consideration.
When Carstairs arrived the very young man in question had just decided to cut all the other thirteen things and stick to the one vital point. He was getting another machine ready as Carstairs mounted the switchboard steps.