He wandered on in an absent manner and his anger quickly cooled as he drew in the fresh, sweet air of the July night and exchanged a pleasant “Good evening” with a couple of labourers plodding by in the gloom. By the time that he had found a convenient stile, which seemed to invite a man to lean on it and look along the misty darkness of the valley, his good humour was quite restored and he had even begun to blame himself. “What an infernal thing it is,” he mused, “to get into the habit of always asking questions; it’s bad enough when you’re interested in the answers, but hopeless when you aren’t in the least. I suppose it’s too late, though, for me to alter that, and it has certainly proved useful once or twice; I doubt if I should ever have got onto the track in the Scrawley case if it hadn’t been for that chance conversation in the ’bus!” He was thinking, as he often did, of the one great case in his career when, favoured by a singular piece of luck, he had succeeded where a much more brilliant man had been totally at sea; it had won him promotion and gained for him a temporary reputation, subsequently to sink to a more solidly based but less elevated level, and it was a harmless belief of his that he might have succeeded without it. “I suppose I resented his seeming to think I had a reason for my remarks just because I might have had,” he thought, and drifted away into a reverie on the inconsequent perversity of human nature. When at last he returned to the inn after a long silent communing with the stars, which on this still, clear night powdered the heavens with peculiar brilliance, he found the landlord standing at the door and entered immediately into the easy conversation he had been so long denied. “A glorious night,” he said, “do you often have weather like this?” “Well, it’s middlin’ good here as a rule about this time o’ year,” replied the man with something of that rather sententious condescension with which inhabitants of a place so often speak of fine weather to a stranger, as if suggesting that they have had some hand in it and should be regarded with gratitude accordingly. “You don’t get much of this sort in Lunnon, likely,” he added, “and I s’pose it’s natural you should notice it. Powerful lot of rain we had last night, though. The other gennelman, ’e’s out somewhere too, enjoying hisself; I shall be locking ’im out if ’e don’t come in soon.” “Who is he, d’you know?” asked Humblethorne incuriously. “No, sir. Traveller, I should say; leastways ’e ain’t stayin’ here, except just for the night, as you might say.” “Well, I’m not sorry to hear it; he’s an unsociable sort of devil. Now I like a fellow who can talk a bit. Pretty place you have here.” “Ay, it is that, so I’m told.” “What’s the best walk about here?” continued Humblethorne. “Not too far; I’m not much of a walker, but I should like to see a bit of the country whilst I’m here.”