it will all fade, vanish utterly in the cold light of day...."

Above him, perplexed brows gathered ominously. "I beg pardon?"

"I--er--yes," he stammered at random.

"You--er--what?"

Positively, she was laughing at him! He, Maitland the exquisite,
Mad Maitland the imperturbable, was being laughed at by a mere
child, a girl scarcely out of her teens. He glanced upward, caught
her eye a-gleam with merriment, and looked away with much vain
dignity.

"I was saying," he manufactured, "that I did not mind the wetting
in the least. I'm happy to be of service."

"You weren't saying anything of the sort," she contradicted
calmly. "However...." She paused significantly.

Maitland experienced an instantaneous sensation as of furtive
guilt, decidedly the reverse of comfortable. He shuffled uneasily.
There was a brief silence, on her part expectant, on his, blank.
His mental attitude remained hopeless: for some mysterious reason
his nonchalance had deserted him in the hour of his supremest
need; not in all his experience did he remember anything like
this--as awkward.

The river purled indifferently about his calves; a vagrant breeze
disturbed the tree-tops and died of sheer lassitude; Time plodded