Where the devil was he? In a train? He fumbled round about the bunk for an electric switch and found nothing to correspond with a sleeping-car’s accessories. His bare feet trod bare and gritty boards. A swept-out hand hit--so that his knuckles were grazed--something cold and hard, which in its turn rattled loud against a similar substance. He stood still and sweated. Presently, his eyes accustomed to the darkness, he recognized on the ground a yard-long slit of pale light by the bunk head. That meant a doorway at any rate. He fumbled till he found a key in a lock, thrust the opened door outwards, and stood on the threshold amazed, gazing out into a strange world in the dimmest light of dawn. There was a road which the near distance swallowed up into nothingness. Vague trees loomed like sentinels. Immediately below three wooden steps at his feet swept a broad stretch of grass bordering the road. Far away across an infinite vastness of plain shimmered the dull lemon and green reflection of some radiance. The rhythmical scrunching sound went on. It was somewhere behind him. He descended the three steps, recognized that what he had taken for a ship was but a sort of gipsy caravan, and that the noise was made by a tethered horse comfortably munching the wayside grass. The most bewildered of young and brilliant leaders of the Chancery Bar, clad only in a flannel shirt reaching to his knees, a vesture of humility for any man counting as religion the decencies of life, returned to the caravan steps and in the dusk of the growing twilight made out that which was therein. Pots and pans and brooms and brushes hanging from roof and walls in a nightmare medley. The bunk was but a thinly cushioned plank, the blanket some dark horror. He entered and his feet grew entangled in what, stooping down, he found to be articles of raiment. He groped and gradually collected a pair of cotton socks, canvas trousers, curiously unfamiliar; yet, on the other hand, his familiar golfing shoes and Norfolk jacket. He dressed himself gladly, for he shivered in the cold of the dawn. Both phenomena, the cold and the dawn, he realized. Blanket around him, he sat on the threshold of the absurd structure in which, without question, he had his immediate being, clasped his head in his hands and concentrated his mind on the solution of the amazing problem: ‘Where am I? And what the devil am I doing here, wherever I am?’ Loss of memory? No. Absurd! He was Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., aged forty-two. All his past life lay an open book to him. Winchester; King’s College, Cambridge; the Bar. From childhood an honourable history of ambition, work and success. He was certainly not wandering about like a fool not knowing who he was. Yet his present circumstances needed elucidation.