“And then?”

“And then, this morning, he would buy a new bicycle—­a different make from his own, at the nearest shop; would rig himself out, at some ready-made tailor’s, with a fresh tourist suit—­probably an ostentatiously tweedy bicycling suit; and, with that in his luggage-carrier, would make straight on his machine for the country.  He could change in some copse, and bury his own clothes, avoiding the blunders he has seen in others.  Perhaps he might ride for the first twenty or thirty miles out of London to some minor side-station, and then go on by train towards his destination, quitting the rail again at some unimportant point where the main west road crosses the Great Western or the South-Western line.”

“Great Western or South-Western?  Why those two in particular?  Then, you have settled in your own mind which direction he has taken?”

“Pretty well.  I judge by analogy.  Lina, your brother was brought up in the West Country, was he not?”

Mrs. Mallet gave a weary nod.  “In North Devon,” she answered; “on the wild stretch of moor about Hartland and Clovelly.”

Hilda Wade seemed to collect herself.  “Now, Mr. Le Geyt is essentially a Celt—­a Celt in temperament,” she went on; “he comes by origin and ancestry from a rough, heather-clad country; he belongs to the moorland.  In other words, his type is the mountaineer’s.  But a mountaineer’s instinct in similar circumstances is—­what?  Why, to fly straight to his native mountains.  In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves; rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there.  Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian frame, is sure to have done so.  I know his mood.  He has made for the West Country!”

“You are, right, Hilda,” Mrs. Mallet exclaimed, with conviction.  “I’m quite sure, from what I know of Hugo, that to go to the West would be his first impulse.”

“And the Le Geyts are always governed by first impulses,” my character-reader added.

She was quite correct.  From the time we two were at Oxford together—­I as an undergraduate, he as a don—­I had always noticed that marked trait in my dear old friend’s temperament.

After a short pause, Hilda broke the silence again.  “The sea again; the sea!  The Le Geyts love the water.  Was there any place on the sea where he went much as a boy—­any lonely place, I mean, in that North Devon district?”

Mrs. Mallet reflected a moment.  “Yes, there was a little bay—­a mere gap in high cliffs, with some fishermen’s huts and a few yards of beach—­where he used to spend much of his holidays.  It was a weird-looking break in a grim sea-wall of dark-red rocks, where the tide rose high, rolling in from the Atlantic.”

“The very thing!  Has he visited it since he grew up?”

“To my knowledge, never.”