It was with infinite relief I caught the approaching noise of the motor cycle and saw Herrick reappear, followed only a few moments later by Lennox with the light spring-wagon. It was decided to take Lessing straightway to the doctor's house, where he could be better looked after than in the bungalow. We laid a mattress in the bottom of the wagon and lifted him on to this, and Herrick and I on the motor cycle accompanied Lennox beyond the hollow at the foot of the hill. Before we started Herrick, his face grim and set in the lamplight, pulled out the revolver I had lent him that morning and handed it to me. "Keep that, Austin. I bought another today. Lennox has his own." "There was an extra box of cartridges," I said, "in the table-drawer." "Lennox gave them to me." When we had seen the wagon well along the road we turned, and rode back to the bungalow. "Now," said Herrick, when we stood once more in the lighted room, "the first thing is to find Mary. And then ... there has got to be an end to this. Are you ready to face it?" He did not need to ask me. I looked round on the little room, gay and friendly with its rugs and books and the great bowls of wildflowers that Mary loved--the countless little signs of her occupation, a sweater flung across a chair, her work-basket of Indian grass on the table--the room in which I had spent so many happy hours, now suddenly sinister in its desertion. And then my eye fell on the couch where we had laid Lessing, and the hideous litter I had left in my haste--stained wads of cotton and the torn strips from his shirt with which we had striven to check the blood before we carried him up from the mill. "For God's sake," I exclaimed impulsively, "let's get that cleared away before she gets back!" Before Mary got back ... the words died in my throat. But I gathered up the telltale evidence all the same--every last scrap and fragment--and thrust them out of sight behind the kitchen woodbox, before I turned to Herrick. "We'll try Sliefers' first," he said. "There's just the possibility she is there." It was a slight chance, and as it proved, fruitless. The farmer was still up, and opened the door to us in stockinged feet. No one there had seen Mary since the afternoon. Sliefer heard our errand with a grave face. "There's no house she'd have come to but this," he said. "There's only Scholl's and Nevill's at the Bend, and they were both asleep as you passed? They're a-bed by ten. Besides, if there was anything out of the way they'd either one of them have sent over here straight. No. Unless the young lady's missed her way, or met with some accident...." He looked at us doubtfully. It was no time to mince matters. We told him, as briefly as we could, what had happened that evening and how we had found Lessing at the mill.