“Very well.  You engage the locum tenens, and I will be prepared to start for Woodford as soon as he turns up.”

“Excellent!” said Thorndyke.  “That is a great weight off my mind.  And if you could manage to drop in this evening and smoke a pipe with us we could talk over the plan of campaign and let you know what items of information we are particularly in want of.”

I promised to turn up at King’s Bench Walk as soon after half-past eight as possible, and my two friends then took their departure, leaving me to set out in high spirits on my scanty round of visits.

It is surprising what different aspects things present from different points of view; how relative are our estimates of the conditions and circumstances of life.  To the urban workman—­the journeyman baker or tailor, for instance, labouring year in year out in a single building—­a holiday ramble on Hampstead Heath is a veritable voyage of discovery; whereas to the sailor the shifting panorama of the whole wide world is but the commonplace of the day’s work.

So I reflected as I took my place in the train at Liverpool Street on the following day.  There had been a time when a trip by rail to the borders of Epping Forest would have been far from a thrilling experience; now, after vegetating in the little world of Fetter Lane, it was quite an adventure.

The enforced inactivity of a railway journey is favourable to thought, and I had much to think about.  The last few weeks had witnessed momentous changes in my outlook.  New interests had arisen, new friendships had grown up; and, above all, there had stolen into my life that supreme influence that, for good or for evil, according to my fortune, was to colour and pervade it even to its close.  Those few days of companionable labour in the reading-room, with the homely hospitalities of the milk-shop and the pleasant walks homeward through the friendly London streets, had called into existence a new world—­a world in which the gracious personality of Ruth Bellingham was the one dominating reality.  And thus, as I leaned back in a corner of the railway carriage with an unlighted pipe in my hand, the events of the immediate past, together with those more problematical ones of the impending future, occupied me rather to the exclusion of the business of the moment, which was to review the remains collected in the Woodford mortuary, until, as the train approached Stratford, the odours of the soap and bone-manure factories poured in at the open window and (by a natural association of ideas) brought me back to the object of my quest.

As to the exact purpose of this expedition, I was not very clear; but I knew that I was acting as Thorndyke’s proxy and thrilled with pride at the thought.  But what particular light my investigations were to throw upon the intricate Bellingham case I had no very definite idea.  With a view to fixing the course of procedure in my mind, I took Thorndyke’s written instructions from my pocket and read them over carefully.  They were very full and explicit, making ample allowance for my lack of experience in medico-legal matters:—­