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“Which was?”

“Try the needle, and judge for yourself. I prefer you should find out. You can tell me to-morrow.”

“It was quick of you to detect it!” I cried, still turning the suspicious object over. “The difference is so slight.”

“Yes; but you tell me my eyes are as sharp as the needle. Besides, I had reason to doubt; and Sebastian himself gave me the clue by selecting his instrument with too great deliberation. He had put it there with the rest, but it lay a little apart; and as he picked it up gingerly, I began to doubt. When I saw the blue gleam, my doubt was at once converted into certainty. Then his eyes, too, had the look which I know means victory. Benign or baleful, it goes with his triumphs. I have seen that look before, and when once it lurks scintillating in the luminous depths of his gleaming eyeballs, I recognise at once that, whatever his aim, he has succeeded in it.”

“Still, Hilda, I am loth—”

She waved her hand impatiently. “Waste no time,” she cried, in an authoritative voice. “If you happen to let that needle rub carelessly against the sleeve of your coat you may destroy the evidence. Take it at once to your room, plunge it into a culture, and lock it up safe at a proper temperature—where Sebastian cannot get at it—till the consequences develop.”

I did as she bid me. By this time, I was not wholly unprepared for the result she anticipated. My belief in Sebastian had sunk to zero, and was rapidly reaching a negative quantity.

At nine the next morning, I tested one drop of the culture under the microscope. Clear and limpid to the naked eye, it was alive with small objects of a most suspicious nature, when properly magnified. I knew those hungry forms. Still, I would not decide offhand on my own authority in a matter of such moment. Sebastian’s character was at stake—the character of the man who led the profession. I called in Callaghan, who happened to be in the ward, and asked him to put his eye to the instrument for a moment. He was a splendid fellow for the use of high powers, and I had magnified the culture 300 diameters. “What do you call those?” I asked, breathless.

He scanned them carefully with his experienced eye. “Is it the microbes ye mean?” he answered. “An’ what ‘ud they be, then, if it wasn’t the bacillus of pyaemia?”

“Blood-poisoning!” I ejaculated, horror-struck.

“Aye; blood-poisoning: that’s the English of it.”

I assumed an air of indifference. “I made them that myself,” I rejoined, as if they were mere ordinary experimental germs; “but I wanted confirmation of my own opinion. You’re sure of the bacillus?”

“An’ haven’t I been keeping swarms of those very same bacteria under close observation for Sebastian for seven weeks past? Why, I know them as well as I know me own mother.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That will do.” And I carried off the microscope, bacilli and all, into Hilda Wade’s sitting-room. “Look yourself!” I cried to her.

She stared at them through the instrument with an unmoved face. “I thought so,” she answered shortly. “The bacillus of pyaemia. A most virulent type. Exactly what I expected.”

“You anticipated that result?”

“Absolutely. You see, blood-poisoning matures quickly, and kills almost to a certainty. Delirium supervenes so soon that the patient has no chance of explaining suspicions. Besides, it would all seem so very natural! Everybody would say: ‘She got some slight wound, which microbes from some case she was attending contaminated.’ You may be sure Sebastian thought out all that. He plans with consummate skill. He had designed everything.”

I gazed at her, uncertain. “And what will you DO?” I asked. “Expose him?”

She opened both her palms with a blank gesture of helplessness. “It is useless!” she answered. “Nobody would believe me. Consider the situation. YOU know the needle I gave you was the one Sebastian meant to use—the one he dropped and I caught—BECAUSE you are a friend of mine, and because you have learned to trust me. But who else would credit it? I have only my word against his—an unknown nurse’s against the great Professor’s. Everybody would say I was malicious or hysterical. Hysteria is always an easy stone to fling at an injured woman who asks for justice. They would declare I had trumped up the case to forestall my dismissal. They would set it down to spite. We can do nothing against him. Remember, on his part, the utter absence of overt motive.”

“And you mean to stop on here, in close attendance on a man who has attempted your life?” I cried, really alarmed for her safety.

“I am not sure about that,” she answered. “I must take time to think. My presence at Nathaniel’s was necessary to my Plan. The Plan fails for the present. I have now to look round and reconsider my position.”

“But you are not safe here now,” I urged, growing warm. “If Sebastian really wishes to get rid of you, and is as unscrupulous as you suppose, with his gigantic brain he can soon compass his end. What he plans he executes. You ought not to remain within the Professor’s reach one hour longer.”

“I have thought of that, too,” she replied, with an almost unearthly calm. “But there are difficulties either way. At any rate, I am glad he did not succeed this time. For, to have killed me now, would have frustrated my Plan”—she clasped her hands—“my Plan is ten thousand times dearer than life to me!”

“Dear lady!” I cried, drawing a deep breath, “I implore you in this strait, listen to what I urge. Why fight your battle alone? Why refuse assistance? I have admired you so long—I am so eager to help you. If only you will allow me to call you—”

Her eyes brightened and softened. Her whole bosom heaved. I felt in a flash she was not wholly indifferent to me. Strange tremors in the air seemed to play about us. But she waved me aside once more. “Don’t press me,” she said, in a very low voice. “Let me go my own way. It is hard enough already, this task I have undertaken, without YOUR making it harder.... Dear friend, dear friend, you don’t quite understand. There are TWO men at Nathaniel’s whom I desire to escape—because they both alike stand in the way of my Purpose.” She took my hands in hers. “Each in a different way,” she murmured once more. “But each I must avoid. One is Sebastian. The other—” she let my hand drop again, and broke off suddenly. “Dear Hubert,” she cried, with a catch, “I cannot help it: forgive me!”

It was the first time she had ever called me by my Christian name. The mere sound of the word made me unspeakably happy.

Yet she waved me away. “Must I go?” I asked, quivering.

“Yes, yes: you must go. I cannot stand it. I must think this thing out, undisturbed. It is a very great crisis.”

That afternoon and evening, by some unhappy chance, I was fully engaged in work at the hospital. Late at night a letter arrived for me. I glanced at it in dismay. It bore the Basingstoke postmark. But, to my alarm and surprise, it was in Hilda’s hand. What could this change portend? I opened it, all tremulous.

“DEAR HUBERT,—” I gave a sigh of relief. It was no longer “Dear Dr. Cumberledge” now, but “Hubert.” That was something gained, at any rate. I read on with a beating heart. What had Hilda to say to me?

“DEAR HUBERT,—By the time this reaches you, I shall be far away, irrevocably far, from London. With deep regret, with fierce searchings of spirit, I have come to the conclusion that, for the Purpose I have in view, it would be better for me at once to leave Nathaniel’s. Where I go, or what I mean to do, I do not wish to tell you. Of your charity, I pray, refrain from asking me. I am aware that your kindness and generosity deserve better recognition. But, like Sebastian himself, I am the slave of my Purpose. I have lived for it all these years, and it is still very dear to me. To tell you my plans would interfere with that end. Do not, therefore, suppose I am insensible to your goodness.... Dear Hubert, spare me—I dare not say more, lest I say too much. I dare not trust myself. But one thing I MUST say. I am flying from YOU quite as much as from Sebastian. Flying from my own heart, quite as much as from my enemy. Some day, perhaps, if I accomplish my object, I may tell you all. Meanwhile, I can only beg of you of your kindness to trust me. We shall not meet again, I fear, for years. But I shall never forget you—you, the kind counsellor, who have half turned me aside from my life’s Purpose. One word more, and I should falter.—In very great haste, and amid much disturbance, yours ever affectionately and gratefully,

“HILDA.”

It was a hurried scrawl in pencil, as if written in a train. I felt utterly dejected. Was Hilda, then, leaving England?

Rousing myself after some minutes, I went straight to Sebastian’s rooms, and told him in brief terms that Nurse Wade had disappeared at a moment’s notice, and had sent a note to tell me so.

He looked up from his work, and scanned me hard, as was his wont. “That is well,” he said at last, his eyes glowing deep; “she was getting too great a hold on you, that young woman!”

“She retains that hold upon me, sir,” I answered curtly.

“You are making a grave mistake in life, my dear Cumberledge,” he went on, in his old genial tone, which I had almost forgotten. “Before you go further, and entangle yourself more deeply, I think it is only right that I should undeceive you as to this girl’s true position. She is passing under a false name, and she comes of a tainted stock.... Nurse Wade, as she chooses to call herself, is a daughter of the notorious murderer, Yorke-Bannerman.”

My mind leapt back to the incident of the broken basin. Yorke-Bannerman’s name had profoundly moved her. Then I thought of Hilda’s face. Murderers, I said to myself, do not beget such daughters as that. Not even accidental murderers, like my poor friend Le Geyt. I saw at once the prima facie evidence was strongly against her. But I had faith in her still. I drew myself up firmly, and stared him back full in the face. “I do not believe it,” I answered, shortly.

“You do not believe it? I tell you it is so. The girl herself as good as acknowledged it to me.”

I spoke slowly and distinctly. “Dr. Sebastian,” I said, confronting him, “let us be quite clear with one another. I have found you out. I know how you tried to poison that lady. To poison her with bacilli which I detected. I cannot trust your word; I cannot trust your inferences. Either she is not Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter at all, or else… Yorke-Bannerman was NOT a murderer....” I watched his face closely. Conviction leaped upon me. “And someone else was,” I went on. “I might put a name to him.”

With a stern white face, he rose and opened the door. He pointed to it slowly. “This hospital is not big enough for you and me abreast,” he said, with cold politeness. “One or other of us must go. Which, I leave to your good sense to determine.”

Even at that moment of detection and disgrace, in one man’s eyes, at least, Sebastian retained his full measure of dignity.

CHAPTER VI
THE EPISODE OF THE LETTER WITH THE BASINGSTOKE POSTMARK

I have a vast respect for my grandfather. He was a man of forethought. He left me a modest little income of seven hundred a-year, well invested. Now, seven hundred a-year is not exactly wealth; but it is an unobtrusive competence; it permits a bachelor to move about the world and choose at will his own profession. I chose medicine; but I was not wholly dependent upon it. So I honoured my grandfather’s wise disposition of his worldly goods; though, oddly enough, my cousin Tom (to whom he left his watch and five hundred pounds) speaks MOST disrespectfully of his character and intellect.

Thanks to my grandfather’s silken-sailed barque, therefore, when I found myself practically dismissed from Nathaniel’s I was not thrown on my beam-ends, as most young men in my position would have been; I had time and opportunity for the favourite pastime of looking about me. Of course, had I chosen, I might have fought the case to the bitter end against Sebastian; he could not dismiss me—that lay with the committee. But I hardly cared to fight. In the first place, though I had found him out as a man, I still respected him as a great teacher; and in the second place (which is always more important), I wanted to find and follow Hilda.

To be sure, Hilda, in that enigmatic letter of hers, had implored me not to seek her out; but I think you will admit there is one request which no man can grant to the girl he loves—and that is the request to keep away from her. If Hilda did not want ME, I wanted Hilda; and, being a man, I meant to find her.

My chances of discovering her whereabouts, however, I had to confess to myself (when it came to the point) were extremely slender. She had vanished from my horizon, melted into space. My sole hint of a clue consisted in the fact that the letter she sent me had been posted at Basingstoke. Here, then, was my problem: given an envelope with the Basingstoke postmark, to find in what part of Europe, Asia, Africa, or America the writer of it might be discovered. It opened up a fine field for speculation.

When I set out to face this broad puzzle, my first idea was: “I must ask Hilda.” In all circumstances of difficulty, I had grown accustomed to submitting my doubts and surmises to her acute intelligence; and her instinct almost always supplied the right solution. But now Hilda was gone; it was Hilda herself I wished to track through the labyrinth of the world. I could expect no assistance in tracking her from Hilda.

“Let me think,” I said to myself, over a reflective pipe, with feet poised on the fender. “How would Hilda herself have approached this problem? Imagine I’m Hilda. I must try to strike a trail by applying her own methods to her own character. She would have attacked the question, no doubt,”—here I eyed my pipe wisely,—“from the psychological side. She would have asked herself”—I stroked my chin—“what such a temperament as hers was likely to do under such-and-such circumstances. And she would have answered it aright. But then”—I puffed away once or twice—“SHE is Hilda.”

When I came to reconnoitre the matter in this light, I became at once aware how great a gulf separated the clumsy male intelligence from the immediate and almost unerring intuitions of a clever woman. I am considered no fool; in my own profession, I may venture to say, I was Sebastian’s favourite pupil. Yet, though I asked myself over and over again where Hilda would be likely to go—Canada, China, Australia—as the outcome of her character, in these given conditions, I got no answer. I stared at the fire and reflected. I smoked two successive pipes, and shook out the ashes. “Let me consider how Hilda’s temperament would work,” I said, looking sagacious. I said it several times—but there I stuck. I went no further. The solution would not come. I felt that in order to play Hilda’s part, it was necessary first to have Hilda’s head-piece. Not every man can bend the bow of Ulysses.

As I turned the problem over in my mind, however, one phrase at last came back to me—a phrase which Hilda herself had let fall when we were debating a very similar point about poor Hugo Le Geyt: “If I were in his place, what do you think I would do?—why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”

She must have gone to Wales, then. I had her own authority for saying so.... And yet—Wales? Wales? I pulled myself up with a jerk. In that case, how did she come to be passing by Basingstoke?

Was the postmark a blind? Had she hired someone to take the letter somewhere for her, on purpose to put me off on a false track? I could hardly think so. Besides, the time was against it. I saw Hilda at Nathaniel’s in the morning; the very same evening I received the envelope with the Basingstoke postmark.

“If I were in his place.” Yes, true; but, now I come to think on it, WERE the positions really parallel? Hilda was not flying for her life from justice; she was only endeavouring to escape Sebastian—and myself. The instances she had quoted of the mountaineer’s curious homing instinct—the wild yearning he feels at moments of great straits to bury himself among the nooks of his native hills—were they not all instances of murderers pursued by the police? It was abject terror that drove these men to their burrows. But Hilda was not a murderer; she was not dogged by remorse, despair, or the myrmidons of the law; it was murder she was avoiding, not the punishment of murder. That made, of course, an obvious difference. “Irrevocably far from London,” she said. Wales is a suburb. I gave up the idea that it was likely to prove her place of refuge from the two men she was bent on escaping. Hong-Kong, after all, seemed more probable than Llanberis.

That first failure gave me a clue, however, as to the best way of applying Hilda’s own methods. “What would such a person do under the circumstances?” that was her way of putting the question. Clearly, then, I must first decide what WERE the circumstances. Was Sebastian speaking the truth? Was Hilda Wade, or was she not, the daughter of the supposed murderer, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman?

I looked up as much of the case as I could, in unobtrusive ways, among the old law-reports, and found that the barrister who had had charge of the defence was my father’s old friend, Mr. Horace Mayfield, a man of elegant tastes, and the means to gratify them.

I went to call on him on Sunday evening at his artistically luxurious house in Onslow Gardens. A sedate footman answered the bell. Fortunately, Mr. Mayfield was at home, and, what is rarer, disengaged. You do not always find a successful Q.C. at his ease among his books, beneath the electric light, ready to give up a vacant hour to friendly colloquy.

“Remember Yorke-Bannerman’s case?” he said, a huge smile breaking slowly like a wave over his genial fat face—Horace Mayfield resembles a great good-humoured toad, with bland manners and a capacious double chin—“I should just say I DID! Bless my soul—why, yes,” he beamed, “I was Yorke-Bannerman’s counsel. Excellent fellow, Yorke-Bannerman—most unfortunate end, though—precious clever chap, too! Had an astounding memory. Recollected every symptom of every patient he ever attended. And SUCH an eye! Diagnosis? It was clairvoyance! A gift—no less. Knew what was the matter with you the moment he looked at you.”

That sounded like Hilda. The same surprising power of recalling facts; the same keen faculty for interpreting character or the signs of feeling. “He poisoned somebody, I believe,” I murmured, casually. “An uncle of his, or something.”

Mayfield’s great squat face wrinkled; the double chin, folding down on the neck, became more ostentatiously double than ever. “Well, I can’t admit that,” he said, in his suave voice, twirling the string of his eye-glass. “I was Yorke-Bannerman’s advocate, you see; and therefore I was paid not to admit it. Besides, he was a friend of mine, and I always liked him. But I WILL allow that the case DID look a trifle black against him.”

“Ha? Looked black, did it?” I faltered.

The judicious barrister shrugged his shoulders. A genial smile spread oilily once more over his smooth face. “None of my business to say so,” he answered, puckering the corners of his eyes. “Still, it was a long time ago; and the circumstances certainly WERE suspicious. Perhaps, on the whole, Hubert, it was just as well the poor fellow died before the trial came off; otherwise”—he pouted his lips—“I might have had my work cut out to save him.” And he eyed the blue china gods on the mantelpiece affectionately.

“I believe the Crown urged money as the motive?” I suggested.

Mayfield glanced inquiry at me. “Now, why do you want to know all this?” he asked, in a suspicious voice, coming back from his dragons. “It is irregular, very, to worm information out of an innocent barrister in his hours of ease about a former client. We are a guileless race, we lawyers; don’t abuse our confidence.”

He seemed an honest man, I thought, in spite of his mocking tone. I trusted him, and made a clean breast of it. “I believe,” I answered, with an impressive little pause, “I want to marry Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter.”

He gave a quick start. “What, Maisie?” he exclaimed.

I shook my head. “No, no; that is not the name,” I replied.

He hesitated a moment. “But there IS no other,” he hazarded cautiously at last. “I knew the family.”

“I am not sure of it,” I went on. “I have merely my suspicions. I am in love with a girl, and something about her makes me think she is probably a Yorke-Bannerman.”

“But, my dear Hubert, if that is so,” the great lawyer went on, waving me off with one fat hand, “it must be at once apparent to you that I am the last person on earth to whom you ought to apply for information. Remember my oath. The practice of our clan: the seal of secrecy!”

I was frank once more. “I do not know whether the lady I mean is or is not Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter,” I persisted. “She may be, and she may not. She gives another name—that’s certain. But whether she is or isn’t, one thing I know—I mean to marry her. I believe in her; I trust her. I only seek to gain this information now because I don’t know where she is—and I want to track her.”

He crossed his big hands with an air of Christian resignation, and looked up at the panels of the coffered ceiling. “In that,” he answered, “I may honestly say, I can’t help you. Humbug apart, I have not known Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman’s address—or Maisie’s either—ever since my poor friend’s death. Prudent woman, Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman! She went away, I believe, to somewhere in North Wales, and afterwards to Brittany. But she probably changed her name; and—she did not confide in me.”

I went on to ask him a few questions about the case, premising that I did so in the most friendly spirit. “Oh, I can only tell you what is publicly known,” he answered, beaming, with the usual professional pretence of the most sphinx-like reticence. “But the plain facts, as universally admitted, were these. I break no confidence. Yorke-Bannerman had a rich uncle from whom he had expectations—a certain Admiral Scott Prideaux. This uncle had lately made a will in Yorke-Bannerman’s favour; but he was a cantankerous old chap—naval, you know autocratic—crusty—given to changing his mind with each change of the wind, and easily offended by his relations—the sort of cheerful old party who makes a new will once every month, disinheriting the nephew he last dined with. Well, one day the Admiral was taken ill, at his own house, and Yorke-Bannerman attended him. OUR contention was—I speak now as my old friend’s counsel—that Scott Prideaux, getting as tired of life as we were all tired of him, and weary of this recurrent worry of will-making, determined at last to clear out for good from a world where he was so little appreciated, and, therefore, tried to poison himself.”

“With aconitine?” I suggested, eagerly.

“Unfortunately, yes; he made use of aconitine for that otherwise laudable purpose. Now, as ill luck would have it”—Mayfield’s wrinkles deepened—“Yorke-Bannerman and Sebastian, then two rising doctors engaged in physiological researches together, had just been occupied in experimenting upon this very drug—testing the use of aconitine. Indeed, you will no doubt remember”—he crossed his fat hands again comfortably—“it was these precise researches on a then little-known poison that first brought Sebastian prominently before the public. What was the consequence?” His smooth, persuasive voice flowed on as if I were a concentrated jury. “The Admiral grew rapidly worse, and insisted upon calling in a second opinion. No doubt he didn’t like the aconitine when it came to the pinch—for it DOES pinch, I can tell you—and repented him of his evil. Yorke-Bannerman suggested Sebastian as the second opinion; the uncle acquiesced; Sebastian was called in, and, of course, being fresh from his researches, immediately recognised the symptoms of aconitine poisoning.”

“What! Sebastian found it out?” I cried, starting.

“Oh, yes! Sebastian. He watched the case from that point to the end; and the oddest part of it all was this—that though he communicated with the police, and himself prepared every morsel of food that the poor old Admiral took from that moment forth, the symptoms continually increased in severity. The police contention was that Yorke-Bannerman somehow managed to put the stuff into the milk beforehand; my own theory was—as counsel for the accused”—he blinked his fat eyes—“that old Prideaux had concealed a large quantity of aconitine in the bed, before his illness, and went on taking it from time to time—just to spite his nephew.”

“And you BELIEVE that, Mr. Mayfield?”

The broad smile broke concentrically in ripples over the great lawyer’s face. His smile was Mayfield’s main feature. He shrugged his shoulders and expanded his big hands wide open before him. “My dear Hubert,” he said, with a most humorous expression of countenance, “you are a professional man yourself; therefore you know that every profession has its own little courtesies—its own small fictions. I was Yorke-Bannerman’s counsel, as well as his friend. ‘Tis a point of honour with us that no barrister will ever admit a doubt as to a client’s innocence—is he not paid to maintain it?—and to my dying day I will constantly maintain that old Prideaux poisoned himself. Maintain it with that dogged and meaningless obstinacy with which we always cling to whatever is least provable.... Oh, yes! He poisoned himself; and Yorke-Bannerman was innocent.... But still, you know, it WAS the sort of case where an acute lawyer, with a reputation to make, would prefer to be for the Crown rather than for the prisoner.”

“But it was never tried,” I ejaculated.

“No, happily for us, it was never tried. Fortune favoured us. Yorke-Bannerman had a weak heart, a conveniently weak heart, which the inquest sorely affected; and besides, he was deeply angry at what he persisted in calling Sebastian’s defection. He evidently thought Sebastian ought to have stood by him. His colleague preferred the claims of public duty—as he understood them, I mean—to those of private friendship. It was a very sad case—for Yorke-Bannerman was really a charming fellow. But I confess I WAS relieved when he died unexpectedly on the morning of his arrest. It took off my shoulders a most serious burden.”

“You think, then, the case would have gone against him?”

“My dear Hubert,” his whole face puckered with an indulgent smile, “of course the case must have gone against us. Juries are fools; but they are not such fools as to swallow everything—like ostriches: to let me throw dust in their eyes about so plain an issue. Consider the facts, consider them impartially. Yorke-Bannerman had easy access to aconitine; had whole ounces of it in his possession; he treated the uncle from whom he was to inherit; he was in temporary embarrassments—that came out at the inquest; it was known that the Admiral had just made a twenty-third will in his favour, and that the Admiral’s wills were liable to alteration every time a nephew ventured upon an opinion in politics, religion, science, navigation, or the right card at whist, differing by a shade from that of the uncle. The Admiral died of aconitine poisoning; and Sebastian observed and detailed the symptoms. Could anything be plainer—I mean, could any combination of fortuitous circumstances”—he blinked pleasantly again—“be more adverse to an advocate sincerely convinced of his client’s innocence—as a professional duty?” And he gazed at me comically.

The more he piled up the case against the man who I now felt sure was Hilda’s father, the less did I believe him. A dark conspiracy seemed to loom up in the background. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked, at last, in a very tentative tone, “that perhaps—I throw out the hint as the merest suggestion—perhaps it may have been Sebastian who—”

He smiled this time till I thought his smile would swallow him.

“If Yorke-Bannerman had NOT been my client,” he mused aloud, “I might have been inclined to suspect rather that Sebastian aided him to avoid justice by giving him something violent to take, if he wished it: something which might accelerate the inevitable action of the heart-disease from which he was suffering. Isn’t THAT more likely?”

I saw there was nothing further to be got out of Mayfield. His opinion was fixed; he was a placid ruminant. But he had given me already much food for thought. I thanked him for his assistance, and returned on foot to my rooms at the hospital.

I was now, however, in a somewhat different position for tracking Hilda from that which I occupied before my interview with the famous counsel. I felt certain by this time that Hilda Wade and Maisie Yorke-Bannerman were one and the same person. To be sure, it gave me a twinge to think that Hilda should be masquerading under an assumed name; but I waived that question for the moment, and awaited her explanations. The great point now was to find Hilda. She was flying from Sebastian to mature a new plan. But whither? I proceeded to argue it out on her own principles; oh, how lamely! The world is still so big! Mauritius, the Argentine, British Columbia, New Zealand!

The letter I had received bore the Basingstoke postmark. Now a person may be passing Basingstoke on his way either to Southampton or Plymouth, both of which are ports of embarcation for various foreign countries. I attached importance to that clue. Something about the tone of Hilda’s letter made me realise that she intended to put the sea between us. In concluding so much, I felt sure I was not mistaken. Hilda had too big and too cosmopolitan a mind to speak of being “irrevocably far from London,” if she were only going to some town in England, or even to Normandy, or the Channel Islands. “Irrevocably far” pointed rather to a destination outside Europe altogether—to India, Africa, America: not to Jersey, Dieppe, or Saint-Malo.

Was it Southampton or Plymouth to which she was first bound?—that was the next question. I inclined to Southampton. For the sprawling lines (so different from her usual neat hand) were written hurriedly in a train, I could see; and, on consulting Bradshaw, I found that the Plymouth expresses stop longest at Salisbury, where Hilda would, therefore, have been likely to post her note if she were going to the far west; while some of the Southampton trains stop at Basingstoke, which is, indeed, the most convenient point on that route for sending off a letter. This was mere blind guesswork, to be sure, compared with Hilda’s immediate and unerring intuition; but it had some probability in its favour, at any rate. Try both: of the two, she was likelier to be going to Southampton.