Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/252

236 "I hope your ladyship won't have to do that," returned my Fellow Worm, alive though trodden under foot. "I have never spent a night in Ste. Enemie, but I 've lunched here, and the food is passable. I should think the rooms would be clean, though rough ⸺"

"I don't find this country attractive enough to pay us for any hardships," said the mistress of our fate. "I never was in such a dreary, God-forsaken waste! Are there no decent hotels to get at?"

Patiently he explained to her, as he had to me, how the better hotels which the Gorge of the Tarn could boast were not yet open for the summer. "If we had not had such a chapter of accidents we should have run through as far as this early in the day, and could then have followed the good motoring road down the gorge, seeing its best sights almost as well as from the river; but ⸺"

"Whose fault were the accidents, I should like to know?" demanded the lady. But obviously there was no answer to that question from a servant to a mistress.

"Shall I inquire about rooms?" the chauffeur asked, calmly.

And it ended in Sir Samuel going in with him, conducted by a smiling and somewhat excited young person who had been holding open the door.

They must have been absent for ten minutes, which seemed half an hour. Then, when Lady Turnour had begun muttering to herself that she was freezing, Sir Samuel bustled back, in a cheerfulness put on awkwardly, like an ill-fitting suit of armour in a pageant. "My dear, they 're very full, but two French gentlemen