Yes. He slept like an enchanted dog. He woke up four hours afterwards to find it pouring with rain. What could he do? He had to get back. Walking, with his rotten old leg, was out of the question. In the daytime a decent looking pedestrian may have the chance of stopping a motoring Good Samaritan and, with a tale of sudden lameness, get a lift by the side of the chauffeur. But at night it was impossible. To stand with arresting arms outspread in front of the hell-lamps of an advancing car would be an act of suicidal desperation. No; he had returned by all sorts of stages. He had almost forgotten them. A manure cart had brought him some way. Then he had gone dot and carry one for a mile. Then something else. He could only hail slow moving traffic in the wet and darkness. Then he spent an endless time in the cab of a steam traction engine which he had abandoned on seeing a two-seater car with flaring head-lamps, stationed at a cottage gate. “The old campaigner’s instinct, Mrs. Pettiland. What should it be but a doctor’s car, outside a poor little cottage? And as the head-lamps were pointing to where I had come from, I concluded he had drawn up and would turn round and go where I wanted to get to.” “And was it a doctor?” He laughed. Of course it was. He had taken shelter from the rain under the hood of the car for an hour. Then, when the cottage door opened, he had scrambled out and waited for the owner. There had been a few words of explanation. By luck, it was Doctor Stansfield of Fanstead—— “Dr. Stansfield—why——” “Why of course. He knows you inside and out. A charming fellow. He dropped me here, or rather I dropped him.” “And he never came in to look after you—a man in your condition? I’ll give him a piece of my mind when I see him.” He soothed the indignant lady. The good doctor was unaware that anything particular was wrong with him. Poor man, he had been on the go since five o’clock the previous morning—human beings are born inconsiderate of the feelings of others—and he was dog-tired. Too dog-tired even to argue. He would have given a lift to Judas Iscariot, or the Leper of Aosta, so long as he wasn’t worried. “He nearly pitched us over, at a curve called Hell’s Corner—you know. The near front wheel was just an inch off the edge. And then he stopped dead and flung his hands over his eyes and said: ‘Oh, my God!’ He had lost his nerve. Then when I told his I had driven everything from a General’s Rolls Royce to an armoured car all over Russia in the war, he let me take the wheel. And that’s the whole thing.”