the maze of vaulted passages--fled in the dark,
and empty-handed, because when he had come into the presence that
informed that house with silence, he had dropped lantern and treasure,
and fled wildly, the horror in his soul driving him before it. Now fear
is more wise than cunning, so, whereas he had sought for hours with his
lantern and with all his thief's craft to find the way out, and had
sought in vain, he now, in the dark and blindly, without thought or
will, without pause or let, found the one way that led to a door, shot
back the bolts, and fled through the awakened rose garden and across the
dewy park.

He dropped from the wall into the road, and stood there looking eagerly
to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, like a
twisted ribbon over the great, grey shoulder of the hill; to the left
the road curved down towards the river. No least black fly of a figure
stirred on it. There are no travellers on such a road at such an hour.

XI

THE GIRL AT THE TOBACCONIST'S

John Selwyn Selborne cursed for the hundredth time the fool that had
bound him captive at the chariot wheels of beauty. That is to say, he
cursed the fool he had been to trust himself in the automobile of that
Brydges woman. The Brydges woman was pretty, rich, and charming;
omniscience was her pose. She knew everything: consequently she knew how
to drive a motor-car. She learned the lesson of her own incompetence at
the price of a broken ankle and a complete suit of bruises. Selborne
paid for his trusting folly with a broken collar-bone and a deep cut on
his arm. That was why he could not go to Portsmouth to see the last of
his young brother when he left home for the wars.

This was why he cursed. The curse was mild--it was indeed less a curse
than an invocation.

"Defend us from women," he said; "above all from the women who think
they know."

The grey gloom that stood for dawn that day crept through the curtains
and made ghosts of the shadows that lingered still in his room. He
stretched himself wearily, and groaned as the stretched nerves vibrated
to the chord of agony.

"There's no fool like an old fool," said John Selwyn Selborne. He had
thirty-seven years, and they weighed on him as the forty-seven when
their time came would not do.

He had said good-bye to the young brother the night before; here in this
country inn, the nearest to the scene of the enlightenment of the
Brydges woman. And to-day the