ative 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."

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 physi