machine from the High Street in some perplexity. He did not know
whether this young lady, who had seized hold of his imagination
so strongly, and her unfriendly and possibly menacing brother,
were ahead of him or even now breakfasting somewhere in
Guildford. In the former case he might loiter as he chose; in the
latter he must hurry, and possibly take refuge in branch roads.

It occurred to him as being in some obscure way strategic, that
he would leave Guildford not by the obvious Portsmouth road, but
by the road running through Shalford. Along this pleasant shady
way he felt suffficiently secure to resume his exercises in
riding with one hand off the handles, and in staring over his
shoulder. He came over once or twice, but fell on his foot each
time, and perceived that he was improving. Before he got to
Bramley a specious byway snapped him up, ran with him for half a
mile or more, and dropped him as a terrier drops a walkingstick,
upon the Portsmouth again, a couple of miles from Godalming. He
entered Godalming on his feet, for the road through that
delightful town is beyond dispute the vilest in the world, a mere
tumult of road metal, a way of peaks and precipices, and, after a
successful experiment with cider at the Woolpack, he pushed on to
Milford.

All this time he was acutely aware of the existence of the Young
Lady in Grey and her companion in brown, as a child in the dark
is of Bogies. Sometimes he could hear their pneumatics stealing
upon him from behind, and looking round saw a long stretch of
vacant road. Once he saw far ahead of him a glittering wheel, but
it proved to be a workingman riding to destruction on a very tall
ordinary. And he felt a curious, vague uneasiness about that