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.