much now, because it may come to short commons if the luck's
against me." Then after the meal there came a temptation to hurry up
his program, and get through some of the little difficulties at once.
He observed his surroundings. The place was fuller now than when he
came in; the atmosphere was thick with tobacco smoke and the steam of
hot food; the kitchen was at its busiest; and at the counter the
stupid-looking girl in charge was handing over refreshments so fast
that it seemed as if soon there would be none left.

He paid a waitress for his supper, and then went into the dark little
lavatory behind the room and put on his canvas suit. Coming out into
the room again, he intended to say something about having slipped on
his overalls for a night job; but nothing of the kind was necessary.
Nobody cared, nobody noticed. His difficulty was to make the counter
girl attend to him at all. He spoke to her bruskly at last; and then
she sold him slices of cold meat, cheese, biscuits, a lot of chocolate
and some nuts, with which he filled those two inner pockets of his
jacket. They had become his larders now.

There were not more than a dozen passengers in the whole train, and no
one on the platform at Waterloo took the faintest notice of him.

No one noticed him three hours later when he left the train at a
station short of Manninglea Cross; and soon he was far from other men,
striking across the dark country, with the stars high over his head,
and his native air blowing into his lungs. He came down over the heath
on the Abbey side of the Cross Roads, and reached Hadleigh Wood just
before dawn.

He felt at home now, alone with the wild animals, on ground that he
had learned the tricks of when he was like a wild animal himself. He
knew his wood as well as any of them. He could make lairs beneath the
hollies, glide imperceptibly among the trees, crawl on his belly from
tussock to tussock, and startle the very foxes by creeping quite close
before they smelled peril. So he hid and glided as the sun climbed the
sky, and then waited and watched when the sun was high, now here, now
there, but always very near the open rides along which people would be
passing. And that day many passed, but not the man he wanted.

He was three days and nights in the wood; and on the morning of the
fourth day somebody saw him.

He had moved stealthily to the stream to drink, and while creeping
back on hands and knees among some holly bushes by a g