or "jacking up." Nevertheless, it's an ill tyre that
blows up for its own good alone, and the forty minutes out of a waning
afternoon made the chauffeur's cold hands hot and the hot engine cold.

Starting on again, we had ten miles of desolation, then a tiny hamlet
which seemed only to emphasize that desolation; again another ten-mile
stretch of desert, and another hamlet; here and there a glimpse of the
railway line, like a great black snake, lost in the snow; now and then
the gilded picture of an ancient town, crowning some tall crag that
stood up from the flat plain below like a giant bottle. And there was
one thrilling view of a high viaduct, flinging a spider's web of
glittering steel across a vast and shadowy ravine. "Garabit!" said the
chauffeur, as he saw it; and I remembered that this road was not new
for him. He did not talk much. Was he thinking of the companion who
perhaps had sat beside him before? I wondered. Was it because he thought
continually of her that he looked at me wistfully sometimes, often in
silence, wishing me away, maybe, and the woman who had spoilt his life
by his side again for good or ill?

Suddenly we plunged into a deep snow-bank which deceitfully levelled a
dip in the road, and the car stopped, trembling like a horse caught by
the hind leg while in full gallop.

On went the first speed, most powerful of all, but not powerful enough
to fight through snow nearly up to the hubs. The Aigle was prisoned like
a rat in a trap, and could neither go back nor forward.

"Well?" I questioned, half laughing, half frightened, at this fulfilment
of the morning's prophecy.

"Sit still, and I'll try to push her through," said Jack jumping out
into the deep snow. "It's only a drift in a hollow, you see; and we
should have got by the worst, just up there at St. Flour."

I looked where his nod indicated, and saw a town as dark and seemingly
as old as the rock out of which it grew, climbing a conical hill, to
dominate all the wide, white reaches above which it stood, like an
armoured sentinel on a watch-tower. As I gazed, struck with admiration,
which for an instant made me forget our plight, he began to push. The
car, surprised at his strength and determination, half decided to move,
then changed her mind and refused to budge. In a second, before he could
guess what I meant to do, I had flashed out of my seat into the snow,
and was wading in his tracks to help him when he snatched me up--a hand
on e