I did not sit down again. I called inside the café, paid what I owed, and walked slowly in the direction the bicycle had taken. There was now, unfortunately, no hurry, and I considered this direction carefully. Two streets led to the right, but one of these might be eliminated, since in order to take it she would have had to skirt the shadow of the Porches, which she could hardly have done without my seeing her. Remained the Rue de la Cordonnerie. This is a narrower slit even than that made by the Porches. The sign of a dingy little restaurant, dimly seen by the light of a lantern high up in the middle of the street, alone seemed to keep the two sides from bumping together. One makes one's way as best one can between two gutters, none too pleasant to the nostrils, and to right and left the low-windowed shops and eating-houses seem to have settled a yard into the earth. Then, half way down this alley, bicycles caught my eye. The murky light from a half-open door on the right showed the gleam of a couple of mudguards. I stepped over the gutter. The next moment I had cursed myself for a fool. The officers from the two great barracks of Duguesclin and Baumanoir dine at the Poste or at the Bretagne, but there is not a cabaret or eating-house in the town that is not nightly visited by the N.C.O.'s and men. To see half a dozen bicycles stacked outside a doorway was the commonest of sights. There were four or five of them here now. Nevertheless I peeped through the half-open door. I saw a low smoky kitchen interior, one half of it like any other kitchen, but the farther end entirely occupied by a dresser crowded with bottles of all shapes and sizes and colours. A fat little woman in a blue-checked apron and lace cap was ironing; the rest of the table was a litter of képis, bottles and glasses. Through drifting cigarette-smoke men's bare heads showed, the red breeches of dragoons, the black breeches of infantry, and a couple of young fellows in horizon-blue, one with a steel cap on his head. No woman's bicycle was likely to be found among those heavy Service machines. I turned away. So she had slipped me for the moment. But she was in Dinan. What to do now? Wire immediately to Alec, I supposed.