cal 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."

"In one word," I said, "you are a psychologist."

"A psychologist," she assented; "I suppose so; and the police--well, the
police are not; they are at best but bungling materialists. They require
a CLUE. What need of a CLUE