Involuntarily, without realizing what he did, Mr. Heatherbloom started to run in the direction the car had gone, but he soon stopped.  What madness!—­to attempt to catch a sixty-horse-power machine!  Why, it was nearly a mile away already.  The young man stood stock-still while a cogent reaction swept over him.  The woman had passed within fifty feet of where he had lain, head near the earth, moping.  A mocking desire to atone for a great remissness found him impotent.  There seemed nothing for him to do now but to reconcile himself to the irreconcilable, to stay here, while every desire urged him to follow her, to learn why this woman was in the car and who was with her.  Naturally, he had expected she would be on the yacht now steaming away out to sea, and here she was.  A new enigma confronted him.

Mr. Heatherbloom continued to stand in the center of the road.  His head whirled; he panted hard, out of breath from his recent dash.  A loud honk! honk! from another machine coming unexpectedly up behind, caused him to leap aside just in time.  The second car whizzed by, although obeying an impulse born on the instant, he called out wildly, waving his arms to bring it to a halt.  If they saw his strange motions—­which was unlikely, the night being dark—­they did not heed them.  Soon the second machine was some distance away; then its rear light gleamed like a vanishing coal and suddenly disappeared altogether around a bend of the road.

He looked back; no other vehicle of any description was in sight now.  But it profited nothing to continue passive, immovable.  He had to act, to walk on, no matter how slowly; his face, at least, was set in the direction the woman had gone.  How long it took him to reach the turn of the thoroughfare he could not tell, but at length there, he came again to an abrupt stop.  Some distance ahead in the road appeared a machine, motionless—­waiting, or broken down.

Which car was it?  The one containing the woman, or the other that came after?  If the former—­He pressed on eagerly, yet keeping to the shadows, alive once more to the need of caution.  His heart pounded hard; he could see a form passing in front of the machine; the light of the lamp enabled him now to make out the other occupants—­three men.  No woman was with them.  This became poignantly, irrefutably evident as he drew nearer.  He could see plainly the empty car and the trio of figures; he could hear them talking but was not yet able to distinguish what they said.  These were the people whose attention he had tried to attract back there in the road.  His purpose then, occurring to him in a flash, renewed itself strongly now.  He would ask their aid; circumstances might enable him to do so now with better grace.  He had had a good deal of experience with cars of divers kinds and makes at different times in the past.  Why not proffer these strangers his fairly expert services?  He felt sure he could soon learn, and repair, what was wrong with the machine.  Having made himself useful, he could then intimate that a “lift” down the road would be acceptable.  And he would probably get it.