Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was impossible. But a quarter of an hour’s demonstration by the foreman convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whir again. All the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The car, which, in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
“And there is nothing to be done?”
“Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth.”
“At any rate,” said Aristide, “send the basket to the Hôtel de Paris.”
He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him, and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, “Cure your Corns.”
At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest country in the world—in that you can live your intimate, domestic life in public, and nobody heeds.
“I hope you’ve not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle,” said Miss Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
“Alas!” said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. “I don’t know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles”—he spoke as if he were a partner in the Maison Hiéropath—“but I don’t quite know what to do with Jean.”
“Oh, I’ll look after Jean.”
“But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day.”