"It seems to be--yes, it certainly is--a pump." Miss Gabriel's voice had begun to shake by this time, but she steadied it. "For the moment I--I half thought it might be a man." "I would to heaven it were!" said Mrs. Pope, fervently. "My dear Charlotte!" "My dear Elizabeth, I mean it. And, what's more, I wouldn't care who he was. A pump? What earthly use is a pump? It must be Mumford's then, if it is a pump." "It can't be." "Why not?" "For the simple reason that Mumford's is on the other side of the road." "Then we _are_ on the other side of the road, as I have been maintaining all along." "Would you mind walking round it?... Yes, you are right. It is Mumford's pump, for I have just bruised my wrist against the handle. Can you find the trough?" "The astonishing thing to me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness." They made the circuit of Mumford's pump, and assured themselves--for what the knowledge was worth--that it really was a pump, and Mumford's. But this cost them dear, for at the end of the circuit, or rather of a circuit and a half, they had lost all sense of their compass bearings. "And after all," Mrs. Pope began afresh, her mind working sympathetically in a circle, "I don't understand what Mumford's pump is doing on the wrong side of the road." "Don't be a ninny, Charlotte! Of course, it's not on the wrong side of the road." "But you said it was." (Pause.) "You really did say so, Elizabeth, for I remember it distinctly." (Another pause, and a sigh.) "For my part, I never pretended to have what they call the bump of locality." The poor lady prattled on, more and more querulously, and to the increasing exasperation of Miss Gabriel, who on the whole believed that they were making for home, yet could not shake off a haunting suspicion that they were moving in a direction precisely opposite. Moreover, the behaviour of Mumford's pump troubled her more than she cared to confess, even to herself. It stood on the right of the road as you went towards St. Hugh's; but they had encountered it upon the left. Therefore, either they had been walking off the road, though in the right direction, or--terrible thought!--somewhere or somehow they had turned right about-face, and were walking away from St. Hugh's.... As a matter of fact, they were bending away from the road in a line which would lead them past the rear of their own back gardens. Their feet no longer trod the causeway. They were on turf, and, so far as they could feel it in the darkness, the turf seemed to be mounting in a fairly stiff slope. Miss Gabriel stooped to feel the grass with the palm of her hand, and just at that moment her ears caught the faint note of a bell, some way ahead. She stood erect, with a little cry of dismay. "That settles it. We have turned round!"