either to an unknown girl's derision or to a sound pummeling at
the hands of fellow passengers enraged by the insult offered to an
unescorted woman....

The young man was still pondering ways and means when a dull bump
apprised him that the ferry-boat was entering the Long Island City
slip. "The devil!" he exclaimed in mingled disgust and dismay,
realizing that his distraction had been so thorough as to permit
the voyage to take place almost without his realizing it. So that
now--worse luck!--it was too late to take any one of the hundred
fantastic steps he had contemplated half seriously. In another two
minutes his charming mystery, so bewitchingly incarnated, would
have slipped out of his life, finally and beyond recall. And he
could do naught to hinder such a finale to the adventure.

Sulkily he resigned himself to the inevitable, waiting and watching,
while the boat slid and blundered clumsily, paddle-wheels churning
the filthy waters over side, to the floating bridge; while the
winches rattled, and the woman, sitting up briskly in the driver's
seat of the motor-car, bent forward and advanced the spark; while
the chain fell clanking and the car shot out, over the bridge,
through the gates, and away, at a very considerable, even if lawful,
rate of speed.

Whereupon, writing _Finis_ to the final chapter of Romance,
voting the world a dull place and life a treadmill, anathematizing
in no uncertain terms his lack of resource and address, Maitland
paid off his cabby, alighted, and to that worthy's boundless
wonder, walked into the waiting-room of the railway terminus
without deviating a hair's-breadth from the straight and