I added "Friday week" to the calendar.

"If we can get Joyce well enough to move away from Nigel's damned cordon of police," I said, "and if we can hide her somewhere till Friday week, friend Gartside's yacht is going to solve a good many problems."

"It's not going to find Sylvia," he answered.

That was unquestionably true.

"I don't know how that's going to be managed," I said.

We sat without speaking until dinner-time, and ate a silent dinner. At eleven o'clock he left the room, changed out of his dress clothes into a tweed suit, and put on a hat and brown walking boots.

"Where are you off to?" I asked when he came back.

"I'm going to find Sylvia."

The expression in his eyes convinced me--if I wanted any convincing--that the strain of the last few days had proved too much for him.

"Leave it till the morning," I said in the tone one adopts in talking to lunatics and drunken men.

"She wants me now."

"A few hours won't make any difference," I urged. "You'll start fresher if you have a night's rest to the good."

The Seraph held out his hand.

"Good-bye. You think I'm mad. I'm not. No more than I ever am. But Sylvia wants me, and I must go to her."

"Where is she?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Then how are you going to find her?"

"I don't know."

"Well, where will you start looking?"

"I don't know."

He was already halfway across the hall. I balanced the rival claims of Joyce and himself. She at least had a doctor and nurse, and a second nurse was coming in the morning. He had no one.

"Damn you, Seraph!" I said under my breath, and then aloud: "Wait a bit and I'll come too."

"Hurry up then!" he answered chafing visibly at the delay.

I spoke a hurried word to the nurse, took a last look at Joyce, changed my clothes and joined him on the landing.

"Which way first?" I asked, and received the answer I might have expected.

"I don't know."

CHAPTER XII

THE SIXTH SENSE

"There was no sound at all within the room. But ... he saw a woman's face.

"He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make--for five seconds, perhaps, the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him ...

lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished."

A.E.W. MASON: "Miranda of the Balcony."

Neither by inclination nor habit am I more blasphemous or foul-mouthed than my neighbour, but I should not relish being ordered a year in Purgatory for every occasion on which I repeated "Damn you, Seraph!"

in the course of the following nineteen or twenty hours.

It was nearly midnight when we left Adelphi Terrace, and I had in my own mind fixed one hour as the maximum duration of my patience or willingness to humour a demented neurotic. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back, and then the Seraph would go to bed, if I had to keep him covered with my revolver. _En parenthese_, I wish I could break myself of the habit of carrying loaded firearms by night. In the settled, orderly Old Countries it is unnecessary; in the West it is merely foolish. I should be the richer by the contents of six chambers before I had time to draw on the quick, resourceful child of a Western State.... Nevertheless, my revolver and I are inseparable.

We started down the Strand, along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, and through Eaton Square to the Cadogan Estate. This was what I ought to have expected, if I had had time to sort out my expectations. The Seraph stood for a few minutes looking up at the Rodens' slumbering house, and then walked slowly eastward into Sloane Street.

"Shall we go back now?" I suggested, in the voice one uses to deceive a child.

"I'm not mad, Toby," he answered, like a boy repeating a lesson. "I must find Sylvia."

He wandered into Knightsbridge, hesitated, and then set out at an uncertain three miles an hour along the border of the park towards Kensington. I realized with a sinking heart that he was heading for Chiswick.

"Better leave it till the morning, Seraph," I urged, with a hand on his shoulder. "She'll be in bed, and we mustn't disturb her."

He shook me off, and wandered on--hands in pocket and eyes to the ground. Twice I thought he would have blundered into an early market-cart, but catastrophe was averted more by the drivers' resource than any prudence on his own part. As we left Kensington and trudged on through the hideous purlieus of Hammersmith, I began to visualize our arrival at the Fraulein's house, and my stammering, incoherent apologies for my companion's behaviour.

The deferential speech was not required. On entering Chiswick High Street we should have turned to the right up Goldhawk Road, and then taken the second or third turning to the left into Teignmouth Terrace. The Seraph plodded resolutely on, looking neither to the right nor left, through Hounslow, past the walls of Sion Park and the gas-works of Brentford, into Colnbrook and open country. There was no reason why he should not follow the great road as far as the Romans had built it--and beyond. Night was lifting, and the stars paled in the blue uncertain light of early dawn.

I gripped him by the shoulders and made him look me in the face.

"We're going back now," I said.

"_You_ can."

"You're coming with me."

"I must find Sylvia."

"If you'll come back now, I'll take you to her in the morning."

"I'm not a child, Toby, and I'm not mad."