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a low voice, repeating almost what Mr. Davis had said.
    â€œWhy do you think he went out at all, in the middle of the night, like that, without telling anyone?”
    Mrs. Howells shook her head.
    â€œBoys is like that, isn’t they? They never talks about the thing they’re thinking most about doing. But I knows, whatever he was trying to do, he was not going back to London. Well, I hopes you’ll be comfortable, young lady!”
    She withdrew, and Kate heard her going down the little wooden staircase, and the murmur of voices below, and the raking out of the fire, and later, as she sat up in bed studying her Ordnance Survey map by the light of a candle, the quick padding steps of Mr. Howells’ stockinged feet and the slower, noisier step of Mrs. Howells’ shoes, coming up again to the next bedroom, and the rattling of a chest-of-drawers on an uneven floor and the creaking of a loose wire-mattress, and then silence.
    Kate sat up on an extremely buxom feather bed on top of two or three other varieties of mattress and two creaking straw palliasses, feeling like a princess in a fairy-story, and examined the map spread out on the Marcella counterpane. Cartography was not Kate’s strong subject, but she supposed that she could master the elements of it with a little determination.
    Radnorshire, according to the map, seemed to be mostly of a brown, warty nature, shading to narrow strips of delicate green, and gemmed here and there with little spots of blue. Hastry was on a pale brown strip, Hastry Station on a pale-green. There was the main road she had come along in Mr. Davis’s tub, crossing the little stream in the valley and forking just this side of it. Here was Pentrewer, in slightly better baked biscuit colour than Hastry, and an inch or so north of it, and here was the black-letter word MOUND, with which Kate had become so familiar in Dorsetshire two years ago. On the other side of the large brown wart Kate took to be Rhosbach, there was a big blue spot and a few black dots marked “Control Station”—doubtless the Berminster waterworks referred to by Mrs. Davis. This was a half-inch map, and Kate, guessing at a radius of five inches, searched everywhere for Llanhalo and Aminta. She found them at last, on a pale brown strip due north of Pentrewer. And there was the Veault, a quarter-of-an-inch farther on.
    Childishly pleased with herself, Kate folded the map up and blew out the candle. The room was so small, and the bed so big, that the little window was within reach, and she leant and drew back the black-out curtain. But she looked into a blackness almost as dense as that within the room. She could not tell whether she were looking on to the pale green valley or the dark brown hill. There was a gusty, noisy wind tearing across the sky. But, at least, the rain had stopped.

Chapter Five
    The next morning, waking disgracefully late, with a slightly suffocated feeling induced by the feather bed, and a mild rheumatic affliction of the hip-joints induced by the straw palliasses underneath, Kate decided that the first thing she must do must be to acquire a bicycle.
    Mr. Howells had gone forth on the business of His Majesty’s Government, and Mrs. Howells was attending to customers in the tiny stone-flagged shop. The tearing wind had torn blue spaces in the clouds for the sun to shine through, and was still at the attack. Kate could see in the distance, down the valley, the slanting lines of rain, but here the wind had blown the hillside dry, tindery leaves rolled along the road, and Monday’s belated washing flapped above the cabbages and battered asters.
    When Kate returned from the cottage of Mrs. Howells’ daughter, Mrs. Evans, it was on a bicycle, with pockets full of pears which Mrs. Evans, foiled in her hospitality by Kate’s refusal to drink another lot of tea or eat another lot of bread-and-butter, had pressed upon her. The straggling village, bathing coldly in