II
Albert, when Tuppence had left him, was deeply perturbed¹.
With the advance of years he had become a person of slow mental pro-cesses, but those processes were tenacious².
The state of affairs in general seemed to him quite wrong.
The war was all wrong to begin with.
“Those Germans,” thought Albert gloomily and almost without rancour.
Heiling Hitler, and goose-stepping and overrunning the world and bomb-ing and machine-gunning, and generally making pestilential nuisances ofthemselves. They’d got to be stopped, no two ways about it—and so far itseemed as though nobody had been able to stop them.
And now here was Mrs. Beresford, a nice lady if there ever was one, get-ting herself mixed up in trouble and looking out for more trouble, andhow was he going to stop her? Didn’t look as though he could. Up againstthis Fifth Column and a nasty lot they must be. Some of ’em English born,too! A disgrace, that was!
And the master, who was always the one to hold the missus back fromher impetuous ways—the master was missing.
Albert didn’t like that at all. It looked to him as though “those Germans”
might be at the bottom of that.
Yes, it looked bad, it did. Looked as though he might have copped one.
Albert was not given to the exercise of deep reasoning. Like most Eng-lishmen, he felt something strongly, and proceeded to muddle³ around un-til he had, somehow or other, cleared up the mess. Deciding that the mas-ter had got to be found, Albert, rather after the manner of a faithful dog,set out to find him.
He acted upon no settled plan, but proceeded in exactly the same way ashe was wont⁴ to embark⁵ upon the search for his wife’s missing handbag orhis own spectacles when either of those essential articles were mislaid.
That is to say, he went to the place where he had last seen the missing ob-jects and started from there.
In this case, the last thing known about Tommy was that he had dinedwith Commander Haydock at Smugglers’ Rest, and had then returned toSans Souci and been last seen turning in at the gate.
Albert accordingly climbed the hill as far as the gate of Sans Souci, andspent some five minutes staring hopefully at the gate. Nothing of a scintil-lating character having occurred to him, he sighed and wandered slowlyup the hill to Smugglers’ Rest.

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