the West Country, was he not?" Mrs. Mallet gave a weary nod. "In North Devon," she answered; "on the wild stretch of moor about Hartland and Clovelly." Hilda Wade seemed to collect herself. "Now, Mr. Le Geyt is essentially a Celt--a Celt in temperament," she went on; "he comes by origin and ancestry from a rough, heather-clad country; he belongs to the moorland. In other words, his type is the mountaineer's. But a mountaineer's instinct in similar circumstances is--what? Why, to fly straight to his native mountains. In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves; rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there. Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian frame, is sure to have done so. I know his mood. He has made for the West Country!" "You are, right, Hilda," Mrs. Mallet exclaimed, with conviction. "I'm quite sure, from what I know of Hugo, that to go to the West would be his first impulse." "And the Le Geyts are always governed by first impulses," my character-reader added. She was quite correct. From the time we two were at Oxford together--I as an undergraduate, he as a don--I had always noticed that marked trait in my dear old friend's temperament. After a short pause, Hilda broke the silence again. "The sea again; the sea! The Le Geyts love the water. Was there any place on the sea where he went much as a boy--any lonely place, I mean, in that North Devon district?" Mrs. Mallet reflected a moment. "Yes, there was a little bay--a mere gap in high cliffs, with some fishermen's huts and a few yards of beach--where he used to spend much of his holidays. It was a weird-looking break in a grim sea-wall of dark-red rocks, where the tide rose high, rolling in from the Atlantic." "The very thing! Has he visited it since he grew up?" "To my knowledge, never." Hilda's voice had a ring of certainty. "Then THAT is where we shall find him, dear! We must look there first. He is sure to revisit just such a solitary spot by the sea when trouble overtakes him." Later in the evening, as we were walking home towards Nathaniel's together, I asked Hilda why she had spoken throughout with such unwavering confidence. "Oh, it was simple enough," she answered. "There were two things that helped me through, which I didn't like to mention in detail before Lina. One was this: the Le Geyts have all of them an