rightened at something
they'd seen. He dashed back to his tyre pumping, and I pranced away down
the road to look intently at a small white stone, as if it had been a
pearl of price.

Afterward I stooped and picked it up. "You're a kind of little milestone
in my life," I said to it. "I think I'd like to keep you, I hardly know
why." And I slipped it into the pocket of my coat.

Every sort of work that you do on a motor-car always seems to take
exactly half an hour. You may _think_ it will be twenty minutes, but you
know in your heart that it will be thirty, to the last second. The
people in the glass-house lost count of time after the first, through
playing some ghastly kind of double dummy bridge, and as they seemed
cheerful Lady Turnour and her dummy were evidently winning. But Mr. Dane
did not lose count, I was sure; and when we had started again, and got a
mile or two beyond Alais, he looked somewhat sternly at the mountains
which no longer appeared ill-shapen. We mounted toward them over the
heads of their children the foothills, and came into a region which
promised wild picturesqueness. There was an extra thrill, too, because
the mountains were the Cevennes, where Robert Louis Stevenson wandered
with his Modestine, and slept under the stars. Judging from the gravity
of the chauffeur's face he was not sure that we, too, might not have to
sleep under the stars (if any), a far less care-free company than
"R.L.S." and his donkey.

Sir Samuel has now exchanged cards for a Taride map, which he often
studied with no particular result beyond mental satisfaction, as he
generally held it upside down and got his information by contraries. But
at a straggling hillside village where two roads bifurcated he suddenly
became excited. Down went the window, and out popped his head.

"You go to the left here!" he shouted, as the Aigle was winging
gracefully to the right.

"I think you're mistaken, sir," replied the chauffeur, stopping while
the car panted reproachfully. "I know the 'Routes de France' says left,
but they told me at Alais a new road had now been finished, and the old
one condemned."

"Well, I'd take anything I heard there with a grain of salt," said Sir
Samuel. "How should they know? Motor-cars are strange animals to them.
If there were a new road the 'Routes' would give it, and _I_ vote for
the left."

"Whose car is it, anyway?" Lady Turnour was heard to murmur, not having
forgiven my Fellow Worm two burst t