e himself to the needless risk and
observation of a railway station? No; I saw at once what he would
do. Beyond doubt, he would cycle. He always wondered it was not done
oftener, under similar circumstances."

"But has his bicycle gone?"

"Lina looked. It has not. I should have expected as much. I told her to
note that point very unobtrusively, so as to avoid giving the police the
clue. She saw the machine in the outer hall as usual."

"He is too good a criminal lawyer to have dreamt of taking his own,"
Mrs. Mallet interposed, with another effort.

"But where could he have hired or bought one at that time of night?" I
exclaimed.

"Nowhere--without exciting the gravest suspicion. Therefore, I conclude,
he stopped in London for the night, sleeping at an hotel, without
luggage, and paying for his room in advance. It is frequently done, and
if he arrived late, very little notice would be taken of him. Big hotels
about the Strand, I am told, have always a dozen such casual bachelor
guests every evening."

"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
n