“Here we are at Ste. Enemie,” said Mr. Dane.  “Don’t you remember about her—­’King Dagobert’s daughter, ill-fated and fair to look upon?’ Well, at this village of hers we must either light our lamps or rest for the night, which ever Sir Samuel—­I mean her ladyship—­decides.”

So he stopped, in a little town which looked a place of fairy enchantment under the moon.  And as the song of the motor changed into jogging prose with the putting on of the brakes, open flew the door of an inn.  Nothing could ever have looked half so attractive as the rosy glow of the picture suddenly revealed.  There was a miniature hall and a quaint stairway—­just an impressionist glimpse of both in play of firelight and shadow.  With all my might I willed Lady Turnour to want to stay the night.  The whole force of my mind pressed upon that part of her “transformation” directly over the deciding-cells of her brain.

The chauffeur jumped down, and respectfully inquired the wishes of his passengers.  Would they remain here, if there were rooms to be had, and take a boat in the morning to make the famous descent of the Tarn, while the car went on to meet them at Le Rosier, at the end of the Gorge?  Or would they, in spite of the darkness, risk—­

“We’ll risk nothing,” Lady Turnour promptly cut him short.  “We’ve run risks to-day till I feel as if I’d been in my grave and pulled out again.  No more for me, by dark, thank you, if I have to sleep in the car!”

“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.