Daylight found him still labouring to reconstitute the succession of incredible episodes leading up to his mad act. Of all the piles of notes he had stuffed under the door not one franc had belonged to him. Of that he was now sure. He recalled also, but less clearly, that some one had given him a banknote—a hundred francs, he thought; was it on the steamer at Marseilles, or in the train?—given it with some mysterious injunction about gambling ... that was as far as he could go at present.... His mind had come down from the empyrean with a crash, and was still dazed from its abrupt contact with reality. At any rate, not a penny of the money was his, and he had left it all under the door in his hotel bedroom at Monte Carlo. And that was two days ago.... The baby was again crying, but the rest of the house still slept when, unkempt, unshorn, and with as many loose ends to his raiment as Hamlet, Professor Hibbart dashed out past an affrighted _bonne_, who cried after him that he might still catch the _autobus_ if he took the short cut to the village. To the Professor any abrupt emergence from his work was like coming to after a severe operation. He floated in a world as empty of ideas as of facts, and hemmed with slippery perpendicular walls. All the way to Monte Carlo those walls were made of the faces in the motorbus, blank inscrutable faces, smooth secret surfaces up which his mind struggled to clamber back to the actual. Only one definite emotion survived: hatred of the being—a woman, was it?—who had given him that fatal hundred franc note. He clung to that feeling as to a life-belt, waiting doggedly till it should lift him back to reality. If only he could have recalled his enemy’s name! Arrived at Monte Carlo he hailed a taxi and pronounced the one name he did recall: _Arcadie_! But what chance was there that the first chauffeur he met would know the title, or remember the site, of that undistinguished family hotel? “_Arcadie?_ But, of course! It’s the place they’re all asking for!” cried the chauffeur, turning without a moment’s hesitation in what seemed to his fare to be the right direction. Yet how could that obscure pension be the place “they” were all asking for, and who in the name of madness were “they”? “Are you sure—?” the Professor faltered. “Of finding the way? _Allons donc_; we have only to follow the crowd!” This was a slight exaggeration, for at that early hour the residential quarter of Monte Carlo was hardly more populous than when the Professor had last seen it; but if he had doubted being on the right road his doubt was presently dispelled by the sight of a well-set-up young man in tennis flannels, with a bright conversational eye, who came swinging along from the opposite direction. “Taber Tring!” cried a voice from the depths of the Professor’s sub-consciousness; and the Professor nearly flung himself over the side of the taxi in the effort to attract his friend’s notice.