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.