be aggravating.
Another half hour wasted! And fat, silvery clouds were poking up their
great white heads over the horizon in the north, where, perhaps, they
were shaking out powder.

The next thing that happened was a snap and a tinkle in our inner
workings, rather like the sound you might expect if a giantess dropped a
hairpin. "Chain broken!" grumbled the chauffeur, as he stopped the car
on the level of a long, straight road, and jumped nimbly down. "We
oughtn't to have boasted yesterday."

"Who's superstitious now?" I taunted him, as he searched the tool-box in
the same way a child ransacks a Christmas stocking.

"Oh, about motor-cars! That's a different thing," said he calmly. "Cold,
isn't it? My fingers are so stiff they feel as if they were all thumbs."

"Et tu, Brute," I wailed. "For _goodness_' sake, don't let _her_ hear
you. She's capable even now of turning back. The invitation to the
chateau hasn't come--and we're not safely in the gorges yet."

"Nor shan't be soon, if this sort of thing keeps on," remarked the
chauffeur. "We shall have to lunch at Alais."

"You say that as if it was the devil's kitchen."

"There's probably first rate cooking in the devil's kitchen; I'm not so
sure about the inns at Alais."

"But it's arranged to picnic on the road to-day for the first time, you
know. They put up such good things at Nimes, and I was to make coffee in
the tea-basket."

"That's why I wanted to get on. Picnic country doesn't begin till after
Alais. Who could lunch on a dull roadside like this? Only a starving
tramp wouldn't get indigestion."

It was true, and I began to detest the unknown Alais. Perhaps, after
all, we might sweep through the place, I thought, without the idea of
lunch occurring to the passengers. But Mr. Dane's heart-to-heart talk
with the Aigle resulted in quite a lengthy argument; and no sooner did a
town group itself in the distance than Sir Samuel knocked on the glass
behind us.

"What place is this?" he asked.

"Alais," was the answer the chauffeur made with his lips, while his
eyebrows said "I told you so!" to me.

"I think we'd better lunch here," Sir Samuel went on. And the arrival of
a princely blue motor car at the nearest inn was such a shock to the
nerves of the landlady and her staff that the interval before lunch was
as long and solemn as the Dead March in Saul. To show what he could do
in an emergency, the chef slaughtered and cooked every animal within
reach for