Raging and without reflection I made the contact which set the car going, and the 80 horse-power engine started to work in the bonnet with the humming of a hive of bees. I seized the starting lever--and then a great guffaw of laughter made me turn round. With his cap over his ears, in blouse of blue, and with his letter-bag on his shoulder, hilarious and triumphant, a postman came on the scene. “Ha, ha! I told you last night that you would lose your way,” said he in a drawling voice. I recognized my villager of Grey-l’Abbaye, and bad temper prevented me answering him. “It’s to Fonval you want to go, is it?” he went on. I cursed Fonval in some very profane language in which I consigned it and its inhabitants to the Devil. “Because,” went on the postman, “if you are going there, I’ll show you the way. I am taking the letters there. But make haste, I have double load to-day; for this is Monday and I don’t come on Sunday.” While saying this, he had drawn his letters from his bag, and was arranging them in his hand. “Show me that,” I cried sharply, “Yes, that yellow envelope.” He looked me up and down distrustfully and then let me look at it from a distance. It was _my_ letter--the announcement of my arrival, which followed it by a night, instead of preceding it by a day! This untoward circumstance absolved my uncle and drove away my rancour. “Get in,” I said. “You shall show me the way and then ... we shall have a talk!” The car set off in the freshness of the morning. A mist was just melting away, as if the sun after whitening the dark had still to dissolve it, and as if this faint fog, now almost nothing, were a portion of the darkness remaining in the form of vapor, an evanescent remainder of the night within the day, the vanishing specter of a vanished phantom. CHAPTER II AMONG THE SPHINXES The car slowly wound its way among the twists and turns of the labyrinth. Sometimes in presence of a cluster of roads the postman himself hesitated for a moment. “Since when have these zigzags taken the place of the straight avenue?” I asked. “Four years ago, Sir--about a year after the settling in of Mr. Learne in the _château_.” “Do you know the meaning of them? You may speak freely. I am the professor’s nephew.” “Oh, well, he’s ... he’s, well an eccentric man.” “What sort of unusual things does he do?” “Oh, well, nothing. One hardly ever sees him. That’s just the funny part of it. Before he took this higgledy-piggledy into his head, one met him often. He used to walk about in the country, but ever since then ... well, he does take the train to Grey once a month.” So all my uncle’s eccentricities came to a head at the same epoch; the maze and the different style of his letters coincided as to date. Something at that time had profoundly influenced his mind. “And what about his companions?” I went on, “the Germans?”