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. "Gasoline! Brrr!" said Maitland, shuddering and shivering with the combination of a nauseous odor and the night's coolness--the latter by now making itself as unpleasantly prominent as the former. Though he hated the smell with all his heart, manfully inconsistent he raised his head, sniffing the air for further evidence; and got his reward in a sickening gust. "Tank leaked," he commented with brevity. "Quart of the stuff must have trickled out right here. Ugh! If it goes on at this rate, there'll be another breakdown before she gets home." And, "Serve her right, too!" he growled, vindictive. But for all his indignation he acknowledged a sneaking wish that he might be at hand again, in such event, a second time to give gratuitous service to his grey lady. Analyzing this frame of mind (not without surprise and some disdain of him who weakly entertained it) he crossed the drive and struck in over the lawn, shaping his course direct for the front entrance of the house.