Having nothing to do, he strolled through the rising ground from which the stupendous edifice commands the plain whose horizon is as vast as that of mid-ocean. Suddenly the tricksy memory that had been playing the devil with him of late captured, unsummoned, the air of the silver flageolet. He hummed it, and somewhat impatiently dismissed it from his thoughts, as he entered the wonder of heaven-seeking piers and shafts of vast spaces and of stained colours of glass through which the sun of the September afternoon streamed ineffably. He sat on a rush-bottomed chair near the font and drank the glory in like a man parched by a lifelong thirst. He went out very tired, hanging his head, feeling half-drunken. He sat on the low parapet of the parvis and remembered words of long ago flitted through his brain: ‘You see that masonry--restored after the fire----’ and so on, and so on; and Martha’s acid voice: ‘Rather pretty, all the same.’ He spread out his hands drunkenly and rushed into the cathedral again and gave himself up to the immensity of its loveliness. Later he called at the Post Office seeking the answer to a long, explanatory telegram which he had sent to Martha from the village where he had learned the date. He must obtain news of her before starting on his homeward journey. In the cathedral he had been so happy; drenched in a sensuous envelopment of beauty. In the crude hall of the Post Office, before the wire-surrounded pigeon-hole, existence shrivelled into sordidness. As a piece of identification he handed his hawker’s licence through the aperture and waited, while search was made, with a grim smile on his face. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., was developing a sense of humour. A scrubby official in a dirty brown holland smock handed him a gummed-up bit of blue paper. He read: ‘In view previous telegrams cannot believe loss of memory story. Conduct disgraceful. Have kept up fiction of nervous breakdown and foreign holiday for the family’s sake. To avoid scandal am willing to receive you. Wire date arrival so that I can announce beforehand. Martha.’ He reeled out of the Post Office. What were the telegrams to which she alluded? However, his deduction had been exact. Martha had known where he was. There had been no mysterious disappearance to make a newspaper sensation. All that was to the good. Martha had also saved his face. Doubtless, the excellent Gregson had returned his briefs with satisfactory explanations. He could go back and take up his work in the most natural way in the world. He could go back and take up Martha who was ‘willing to receive’ him. He noted that the telegram bore the place name Paddington. It was characteristic of Martha not to trust to the Ealing Post Office, but to take the train in order to send the message from the London Terminus.