For a while past there had been a scant traffic along the endless road; farmers’ carts, lumbering waggons and here and there a brisk little ramshackle motor-car. He clambered to the platform above the shafts, took the reins and the horse moved on at a sober walk. He lit another pipe and reconstructed his elusive history. And now, having got his brain into working order, he concentrated it on the facts such as he knew them. The key in his pocket, the singularly unclean shirt that he was wearing, proved that he had journeyed straight from Ealing to his present position near Chartres. He had therefore mysteriously disappeared from his home. He grasped at the sudden realization of what this must have meant to Martha. [Illustration: HE LIT ANOTHER PIPE] He dropped the reins and sat, feet dangling, horror-stricken, while the horse plodded stolidly on. For the twenty years of their married life, during his brief and rare absences from home, she had never been without full news of his whereabouts. She must have been, must still be, frantic with anxiety. He must telegraph to her at once. Why not leave this ridiculous gipsy van on the road and beg a lift from the first passing car to Chartres? Possibly, if one had passed just then, he would have obeyed the impulse. But these were days long before the war, when small busy cars were not yet as ants along the roads of France. By the time one rattled by, his exact mind had grappled with the circumstances. That he should be the hero of a ‘mysterious disappearance’ was incredible. Martha, a capable woman, would at once have put the police on his track. A well-known man dressed in golf clothes and without any luggage couldn’t make his way from London to Folkestone to Boulogne, without leaving behind him a thousand traces of his passing. People didn’t disappear in such simple and casual fashion. The sensitive network of civilization rendered it an impossibility. If he had been wandering about suffering from loss of memory, some tactful messenger would have discovered him and brought him home. Well, he would send his telegram, give the caravan to the first blind beggar, and start at once for England. How he should manage to account for his defection in the matter of ‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen & Smith,’ he did not know. But he surely could get back in time for the re-opening of the Courts--the Trinity sittings--and leave the necessary excuses to the wit of his excellent clerk. He had a heavy couple of months before him. The old sixteen hours a day grind. Loss of memory or not, he must have had a marvellous holiday to put him in this pink of physical condition. ‘Poor old Martha _must_ know,’ said he.