Jack admitted the good sense of it, but he did little work, and after they had supped he went some way down to the road toward the village of Andana in the hope that he might discover Benny and the sleigh. It was a vain quest, however, and he returned to tell the abbé that the wind had nearly blown him off his legs, and that if Benny had refused to return from Sierre, he was no fool for his choice. Thereafter they ceased to speak about it, but neither suggested bed; and although they slept a little after twelve o’clock, the dawn found them wide awake and alert for tidings of the wanderer. Benny was at Sierre—their guess was perfectly correct. Where they were at fault was in the matter of motive, which they failed entirely to comprehend. Which mystery is the better understood by harking back to the bridle track below Vermala, at an hour when a certain foreigner spoke of a strange affair upon the hillside, and those two masters of idiomatic but obsolete French, Bob Otway and Dick Fenton, responded incoherently to his vain appeals. Benny, it will be remembered, had heard the Frenchman’s story, and immediately understood its meaning. His knowledge of Luton Delayne convinced him that such an act of folly was to be expected from a man famous in two counties for the violence of his temper. He perceived that some scandalous affair had set the police upon the baronet’s track, that one of them had been set to watch him and had been detected in the act. There had been an exchange of angry words, of abuse upon the one hand and of insolence upon the other—and then the blow. Just as Luton Delayne had invited the contempt of his neighbours at Holmswell by descending to a vulgar arena in which a butcher figured not ingloriously, so here in Switzerland had his temper got the better of him and this blow been struck. What the consequences might be, Benny did not care to ask himself; but he realised that they might be momentous, and remembering that the man was Lily’s husband, he went up to Vermala at once and began to search the hillside. Was it possible that the affair had been nothing but an idle fracas after all? Had the gendarme gone off to report the matter to his superiors, as one calling for a prosecution which would amuse the community? It might be that, he said, and disbelieving it utterly, he turned to the heights.