Indeed, his restraint was admirable, the circumstances
considered. He did nothing whatever but stand still for a matter
of five minutes, vainly racking his memory for a clue to the
identity of "Miss Wentworth."
At length he gave it up in despair and abstractedly felt for his
watch-fob. Which wasn't there. Neither, investigation developed,
was the watch. At which crowning stroke of misfortune,--the
timepiece must have slipped from his pocket into the water while
he was tinkering with that infamous carbureter,--Maitland turned
eloquently red in the face.
"The price," he meditated aloud, with an effort to resume his
pose, "is a high one to pay for a wave of a grey glove and the
echo of a pretty laugh."
With which final fling at Fortune he set off again for Maitland
Manor, trudging heavily but at a round pace through the dust that
soon settled upon the damp cloth of his trousers legs and
completed their ruination. But Maitland was beyond being disturbed
by such trifles. A wounded vanity engaged his solicitude to the
exclusion of all other interests.
At the end of forty-five minutes he had covered the remaining
distance between Greenfields station and Maitland Manor. For five
minutes more he strode wearily over the side-path by the box hedge
which set aside his ancestral acres from the public highway. At
length, with an exclamation, he paused at the first opening in the
living barrier: a wide entrance from which a blue-stone carriage
drive wound away to the house, invisible in the waning light,
situate in the shelter of the grove of trees that studded the
lawn.
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