IT was close on midnight when a car grated and stopped in front of the little Georgian house in Pendish, and the truant stumbled through the door, left open, into the presence of Mrs. Pettiland who was anxiously awaiting him. He was wet through, dishevelled, exhausted. He was shivering with cold and his face was like the mask of a ghost. She met him in the passage and dragged him into the little sea-haunted parlour. “Oh, what have you been doing?” She had been worried all day, unable to account for the money, a month’s rent and board in advance, in the envelope addressed to her. “Didn’t I tell you not to overdo yourself?” He greeted her upbraidings with a laugh of bravado. “I set out to-day on my last adventure. This is the end of it. I’m here for the rest of time.” “You’ll be in the churchyard for the rest of eternity, if you don’t go to bed at once,” she declared. She packed him to his room; fussed motherwise about him; dosed him with ammoniated quinine; stuck hot-water bottles in his bed; stood over him with hot Bovril with an egg in it. She prescribed whisky, also hot; but since the fatal night at Rowington’s dinner party, he had abjured alcohol. “Now perhaps you’ll tell me what has happened,” she said. “My game leg gave out when I got to some quarries. I believe the beastly place is called Woorow——” “Woorow! Why that’s the other side of the county!” She looked at him aghast. “Do you mean to say that you walked to Woorow in your state? Really men oughtn’t to be allowed to run about loose.” “I’ve run about loose since I was fourteen,” said he. “And a pretty mess you seem to have made of it. And then what did you do?” She took away the cup of Bovril and poached egg which he had devoured ravenously, to her womanly satisfaction, and handed him another. He continued his story, recounting it, between spoonfulls, in his imaginative way. When he found he could go no further he curled up to sleep in a wood. When things went wrong, he assured her, there was nothing like going to sleep in a wood. All the pixies and elves and rabbits and stoats and weasels came and sat round you in a magic circle, shielding you from harm. What would have happened to the Babes in the Wood, he cried, if it hadn’t been for the robins? “I wonder what your temperature is,” said Mrs. Pettiland. “Normal,” said he. “This is the first hour I’ve been normal for months.” “I’ll take it before I leave you,” she said. “Well, you went to sleep?”