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had its lid on, and I practically bounced off it on to the nearest bicycle. The detective hit an ash-can with its lid off. It took him a couple of seconds to climb out.
     
    There was an alley leading out of the yard into one of the main streets of Saxminster. I took it, just missing the bumper of a horrified driver. Corners, as in most country towns, were close together. I turned three of them at random, and then looked back. There was no one in immediate pursuit. I turned a fourth corner, and found myself in a narrow road with backs of ancient buildings on one side and an endless row of cottages on the other. Here I was certain to be trapped if I tried mere speed; so I propped my bicycle against the kerb outside a greengrocer’s shop, with the delivery boy’s bicycle to keep it company, and dived into a narrow archway which passed under the buildings on my right. Two minutes since I hit the ash-can? I do not think it can have been more.
     
    The passage led into the cathedral close. There were already signs that Saxminster resented the affront to its administration. Huddled against the wall, I watched a constable dash into the saloon bar of the leading hotel. He didn’t want a drink; he was alerting the authorities. An excited group poured out of the bar into the street. Had I really been a communist I should have described them as typical fascist hyenas; they’d have sat on my head at once, and that, to judge by the expanse of some of their riding breeches, would have been the end of me. The Black Maria - no time yet to call up any other police car - was cruising between the cathedral lawns and the lovely fat houses of church dignitaries. A constable was at the corner of the next street; another was running to take his post at the main door of the cathedral. I don’t know whether I was expected to take sanctuary or hide in it or blow it up, but evidently the close was the net into which I was to be driven. Naturally enough. If the main outlets from the town were blocked, all other roads led to the cathedral. And there, in fact, I was.
     
    Within the next minute someone was sure to go through the dark length of the passage and discover me. My only possible refuge was a door with a brass plate on it, marked chapter offices. I entered with reverent assurance, as if I had been booking orders for a cheap line in chasubles. The attitude was wasted, for there was no one to receive me. On the ground floor were two offices, from one of which came the sound of a typewriter. The other had a little frosted glass window and a notice: For Attention, Please Ring. I decided against Attention, though considering it as a possibility. In these canonical offices no one would know my face, and with a good enough story I might have been allowed to sit down and wait for the Dean. The bicycle - an old, black one - was unlikely to attract attention, and, with luck, it would not be found and identified by its owner for some hours.
     
    The stairs, however, were more tempting. I went up. There were three doors on the landing. Two of them looked businesslike and unceremonious; but the third, a double door of black oak, was ecclesiastic. You could bet that there was emptiness behind - in a worldly sense, I mean. I opened it, ready to retire hastily with an excuse, and found a very fine seventeenth-century hall with a long table down the middle. There the Dean presumably presided over his chapter.
     
    It was too late for any directors’ meeting, and so, if canons kept the same hours, their board-room seemed to offer shelter for the night. But there was no cover. The curtains, of faded magnificence and rich in folds, would not do; it might be somebody’s duty to come in and draw them. From the walls portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churchmen looked down upon me. They had the casual air of aristocrats who had merely dressed up in bands and black for the purpose of being painted. I was fortified by their approval.
     
    At the far