"With Miss Molloy?" said the silver voice flatly. "Yes, miss." Silence again. "Did he say when he would be back?" "No, miss. But I understand that he was not proposing to return till quite late in the day." More silence. "Oh?" "Yes, miss. Any message I can give him?" "No, thank you.... No...! No, it doesn't matter." "Very good, miss." Sturgis returned to his pantry. Pat, hanging up the receiver, went out into her garden. Her face was set, and her lips compressed. A snail crossed her path. She did not tread on it, for she had a kind heart, but she gave it a look. It was a look which, had it reached John, at whom it was really directed, would have scorched him. She walked to the gate and stood leaning on it, staring straight before her. CHAPTER XI I It had been the opinion of Dolly Molloy, expressed during her conversation with Mr. Twist, that John, on awaking from his drugged slumber, would find himself suffering a headache. The event proved her a true prophet. John, as became one who prized physical fitness, had been all his life a rather unusually abstemious young man. But on certain rare occasions dotted through the years of his sojourn at Oxford he had permitted himself to relax. As for instance, the night of his twenty-first birthday ... Boat-Race Night in his freshman year ... and, perhaps most notable of all, the night of the university football match in the season when he had first found a place in the Oxford team and had helped to win one of the most spectacular games ever seen at Twickenham. To celebrate each of these events he had lapsed from his normal austerity, and every time had wakened on the morrow to a world full of grayness and horror and sharp, shooting pains. But never had he experienced anything to compare with what he was feeling now. He was dimly conscious that strange things must have been happening to him, and that these things had ended by depositing him on a strange bed in a strange room, but he was at present in no condition to give his situation any sustained thought. He merely lay perfectly still, concentrating all his powers on the difficult task of keeping his head from splitting in half. When eventually, moving with exquisite care, he slid from the bed and stood up, the first thing of which he became aware was that the sun had sunk so considerably that it was now shining almost horizontally through the barred window of the room. The air, moreover, which accompanied its rays through the window had that cool fragrance which indicates the approach of evening. Poets have said some good things in their time about this particular hour of the day, but to John on this occasion it brought no romantic thoughts. He was merely bewildered. He had started out from Rudge not long after eleven in the morning, and here it was late afternoon.