We breakfasted at Exeter, and I had the opportunity of a shave and a bath. I remember that when I was half-way up the hotel stairs a horrid thought struck me, and I hurried down again to consult Danjuro. How would the stuff he had put on my skin stand hot water and soap? He reassured me, however. Nothing would remove the beastly stuff but a preparation he carried with him, and I bathed in peace. It was a beautiful morning when we started again, and for many miles our route lay close to the smiling Devon sea. The waves were sapphire blue, framed in the red sandstone rocks, and the sky resembled a great hollow turquoise. It was a bright morning, and one side of me rejoiced in it; but the thought of my girl was always there, a constant sullen pain, for which the morning held no anodyne. Thumbwood drove on this stretch of the journey, and Danjuro sat inside studying innumerable maps, and now and then making notes in a pocket-book. I wondered what thoughts were seething and bubbling behind that massive dome of skull. Apart from the scenery, there was plenty to interest a Commissioner of Air Police. The sky was speckled with small private planes, converging upon Plymouth or Exeter from many a pleasant country residence. There was no longer any need for the professional man or the prosperous tradesman to live within a very few miles of his place of business. Men flew to their day's work, and from considerable distances, and as a matter of course. A mile or two out at sea one distinguished the large steady-going passenger airships by which England was now ringed, and occasionally the Royal Mail boats cut the sky like javelins. More than once I spotted one of my police patrols. It was curious to remember that I, who sat here with a stained face and shaven lip, bowling along the Devon roads at a miserable forty miles an hour, had supreme control of all those aerial argosies. There were few cars upon the roads at this early hour. Contrary to general opinion fifteen years ago, the popularity of flying had by no means killed the automobile. It had lessened their numbers in an appreciable degree, and made the roads more pleasant. I should, of course, have preferred to reach our destination, or, at any rate, to have travelled the greater part of the way towards it by airship. The system of registration and the police regulations--framed by myself--would have given too much away. My actual identity and purpose might not have been discovered, but we should have been easily traced, and Helzephron--if he was what we suspected--would be the first to hear of a private aeroplane making its appearance in the solitudes where he lived.