Chapter 6 - Page 2

try to strike a trail by applying her
own methods to her own character. She would have attacked the question,
no doubt,"--here I eyed my pipe wisely,--"from the psychological
side. She would have asked herself"--I stroked my chin--"what such a
temperament as hers was likely to do under such-and-such circumstances.
And she would have answered it aright. But then"--I puffed away once or
twice--"SHE is Hilda."

When I came to reconnoitre the matter in this light, I became at once
aware how great a gulf separated the clumsy male intelligence from
the immediate and almost unerring intuitions of a clever woman. I am
considered no fool; in my own profession, I may venture to say, I was
Sebastian's favourite pupil. Yet, though I asked myself over and over
again where Hilda would be likely to go--Canada, China, Australia--as
the outcome of her character, in these given conditions, I got no
answer. I stared at the fire and reflected. I smoked two successive
pipes, and shook out the ashes. "Let me consider how Hilda's temperament
would work," I said, looking sagacious. I said it several times--but
there I stuck. I went no further. The solution would not come. I felt
that in order to play Hilda's part, it was necessary first to have
Hilda's head-piece. Not every man can bend the bow of Ulysses.

As I turned the problem over in my mind, however, one phrase at last
came back to me--a phrase which Hilda herself had let fall when we were
debating a very similar point about poor Hugo Le Geyt: "If I were in his
place, what do you think I would do?--why, hide myself at once in the
greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains."

She must have gone to Wales, then. I had her own authority for saying
so.... And yet--Wales? Wales? I pulled myself up with a jerk. In that
case, how did she come to be passing by Basingstoke?

Was the postmark a blind? Had she hired someone to take the letter
somewhere for her, on purpose to put me off on a false track? I could
hardly think so. Besides, the time was against it. I saw Hilda at
Nathaniel's in the morning; the very same evening I received the
envelope with the Basingstoke postmark.

"If I were in his place." Yes, true; but, now I come to think on it,
WERE the positions really parallel? Hilda was not flying for her life
from justice; she was only endeavouring to escape Sebastian--and
myself. The instances she had quoted of the mountaineer's curious homing
instinct--the wild yearning he feels at moments of great straits to bury
himself among the nooks of his native hills--were they not all instances
of murderers pursued by the police? It was abject terror that drove
these men to their burrows. But Hilda