Hilda’s voice had a ring of certainty.  “Then that is where we shall find him, dear!  We must look there first.  He is sure to revisit just such a solitary spot by the sea when trouble overtakes him.”

Later in the evening, as we were walking home towards Nathaniel’s together, I asked Hilda why she had spoken throughout with such unwavering confidence.  “Oh, it was simple enough,” she answered.  “There were two things that helped me through, which I didn’t like to mention in detail before Lina.  One was this:  the Le Geyts have all of them an instinctive horror of the sight of blood; therefore, they almost never commit suicide by shooting themselves or cutting their throats.  Marcus, who shot himself in the gun-room, was an exception to both rules; he never minded blood; he could cut up a deer.  But Hugo refused to be a doctor, because he could not stand the sight of an operation; and even as a sportsman he never liked to pick up or handle the game he had shot himself; he said it sickened him.  He rushed from that room last night, I feel sure, in a physical horror at the deed he had done; and by now he is as far as he can get from London.  The sight of his act drove him away; not craven fear of an arrest.  If the Le Geyts kill themselves—­a seafaring race on the whole—­their impulse is to trust to water.”

“And the other thing?”

“Well, that was about the mountaineer’s homing instinct.  I have often noticed it.  I could give you fifty instances, only I didn’t like to speak of them before Lina.  There was Williams, for example, the Dolgelly man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a poaching affray; he was taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks, a week later.  Then there was that unhappy young fellow, Mackinnon, who shot his sweetheart at Leicester; he made, straight as the crow flies, for his home in the Isle of Skye, and there drowned himself in familiar waters.  Lindner, the Tyrolese, again, who stabbed the American swindler at Monte Carlo, was tracked after a few days to his native place, St. Valentin, in the Zillerthal.  It is always so.  Mountaineers in distress fly to their mountains.  It is a part of their nostalgia.  I know it from within, too:  if I were in poor Hugo LeGeyt’s place, what do you think I would do?  Why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”

“What an extraordinary insight into character you have!” I cried.  “You seem to divine what everybody’s action will be under given circumstances.”

She paused, and held her parasol half poised in her hand.  “Character determines action,” she said, slowly, at last.  “That is the secret of the great novelists.  They put themselves behind and within their characters, and so make us feel that every act of their personages is not only natural but even—­given the conditions—­ inevitable.  We recognise that their story is the sole logical outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personae.  Now, I am not a great novelist; I cannot create and imagine characters and situations.  But I have something of the novelist’s gift; I apply the same method to the real life of the people around me.  I try to throw myself into the person of others, and to feel how their character will compel them to act in each set of circumstances to which they may expose themselves.”