This might have been the case, but Mrs. Caldershaw never explained, and carried the reason of her fright in silence to her untimely grave. Connecting Mrs. Giles' story with the remark of Miss Destiny as to the value set on the glass eye by the woman, and with the sinister fact that the glass eye was missing, I felt certain that the way to begin the search was to take the eye itself as a clue. Local gossip in Mootley revealed few useful facts, as Mrs. Faith appeared to be the sole person who had been told about the eye by its owner, and none of the villagers seemed to know that one eye had been different to the other. But in Burwain, where Mrs. Caldershaw had lived for years as Gabriel Monk's housekeeper, and as nurse to his niece, the truth might be found by careful inquiry. If I could learn where the unfortunate woman got her glass eye, and what accident had brought about the necessity for a glass eye, the chances were that I might learn something which would enable me to trace the truth. Therefore I determined to go to Burwain and hunt out all information about Mrs. Caldershaw's past. Meanwhile there remained the field near Murchester to be explored. Next morning Cannington was engaged on some court-martial so I was left to my own devices, although he wanted to hand me over for entertainment to a less busy brother officer. I excused myself on the plea that I wished to walk off a headache, and so contrived to leave the Barracks unhindered. It was nine o'clock when I set out, and the morning was wonderfully clear for misty August. The field, as I stated before, was only half a mile from Murchester, so I speedily arrived therein. I left the middle of it, where the Rippler had been stranded, severely alone, and skirted round the sides to examine the hedges. These were ragged and untrimmed, with deep ditches on their inner sides, and consisted of holly, bramble, hawthorn, and various saplings. I scratched myself more or less severely for quite one hour, but without discovering any sign of the white cloak. Perhaps, I thought, much discouraged, the woman had risked wearing it after all. Yet I could not believe that she had been such a fool, seeing how cleverly she had manipulated her escape. Then I noticed that there were two gates to the field, one with the broken bars, through which she had entered from the high-road in the car, and the other on the far side, to the right-hand looking from the road. It then occurred to me that the flying lady, scared by meeting Miss Destiny's trap, and perhaps afraid lest she had injured it and would be stopped for damages, might have left the field by this last gate. I immediately walked towards it and found that it opened on to a narrow lane, which in winter must have become a stream of mud. The hedges were very ragged and tangled here, and the gate was nearly hidden, a common five-barred, unpainted gate, in a worse condition than that opening on to the road.