"No. We'll slip off the main road at Cobham and trickle in through the byes." "Right oh! tell me when." For some miles they drove in silence and once again between Ripley and Guildford had a glimpse of the following lights. With a considerable shock Barraclough realised that the distance separating the two cars had greatly diminished. But hereabouts an unexpected piece of luck favoured them. At a point where the road narrowed between hedges a farm gate was thrown open and a flock of sheep was driven out into the highway. Flora contrived to dash past before the leaders of the flock came through the gate. Another second and she would have been too late. Glancing back Anthony observed that the entire road was solid with sheep, a compact mass that moved neither forward nor backward. "Our friends'll lose five minutes penetrating that," he announced gleefully. It did not occur to him until later that every one of those woolly ewes was an unknowing servant of Hugo van Diest and that their presence in the road was the direct result of a wire dispatched to a quiet little man named Phillips who had been given the task of making the way into London difficult. Mr. Phillips had not had very much time, but he had done his best. A series of telegraph poles had been cut down outside Staines, Slough, and at various points along the Portsmouth road. A huge furniture van with its wheels off obstructed the narrows at Brentford, and in one or two places wires had been drawn across the King's highway. It was the side turning at Cobham saved them running into one of these obstacles by a narrow margin of scarcely a hundred yards. Also it was the side turning, bumpy narrow and twisted that proved their undoing. An upward climb, a perilously fast descent, a corner taken a trifle too fine, a sharp flint, a burst front tyre, and at a point where two roads crossed the veteran car almost somersaulted into a ditch, wrecked beyond hope of repair. They were doing forty when it happened and it was a miracle they escaped with their lives. Flora was first to scramble over the tilted side and survey the ruins of their hopes. Anthony still wrapped in his mother's cloak followed and shook his head over the extent of the damage. "You hurt?" he asked. "No. Are you?" "I'm all right. What happened?" "Front tyre. Wheel fairly kicked out of my hand." "It's damn bad luck," said Anthony. "Brutal." She bent over and switched off her lights. "What are we going to do?" He looked at a sign-post, knocked crooked by the car when it plunged off the metal into the ditch. "This road leads from Oxshott--London that way. With any luck we might get a lift." "Late for anything to be about." She looked back along the way they had come. The road could be seen threading its way among pines for a couple of miles or more. "We shall know they're coming five minutes before they can get here. Still I suppose you won't wait for them."