When Sam had left, which he did rather in the manner of a heavyfather in melodrama, shaking the dust of an erring son's thresholdoff his feet, I mixed myself a high-ball, and sat down to considerthe position of affairs. It did not take me long to see that theinfernal boy had double-crossed me with a smooth effectivenesswhich Mr Fisher himself might have envied. Somewhere in this greatcity, as Sam had observed, he was hiding. But where? London is avague address.

　　I wondered what steps Sam was taking. Was there some undergroundsecret service bureau to which persons of his profession hadaccess? I doubted it. I imagined that he, as I proposed to do, wasdrawing the city at a venture in the hope of flushing the quarryby accident. Yet such was the impression he had made upon me as aman of resource and sagacity, that I did not relish the idea ofhis getting a start on me, even in a venture so uncertain as this.

　　My imagination began to picture him miraculously inspired in thesearch, and such was the vividness of the vision that I jumped upfrom my chair, resolved to get on the trail at once. It washopelessly late, however, and I did not anticipate that I shouldmeet with any success.

　　Nor did I. For two hours and a half I tramped the streets, myspirits sinking more and more under the influence of failure and ablend of snow and sleet which had begun to fall; and then, tiredout, I went back to my rooms, and climbed sorrowfully into bed.

　　It was odd to wake up and realize that I was in London. Yearsseemed to have passed since I had left it. Time is a thing ofemotions, not of hours and minutes, and I had certainly packed aconsiderable number of emotional moments into my stay at SansteadHouse. I lay in bed, reviewing the past, while Smith, with acheerful clatter of crockery, prepared my breakfast in the nextroom.

　　A curious lethargy had succeeded the feverish energy of theprevious night. More than ever the impossibility of finding theneedle in this human bundle of hay oppressed me. No one isoptimistic before breakfast, and I regarded the future with dullresignation, turning my thoughts from it after a while to thepast. But the past meant Audrey, and to think of Audrey hurt.

　　It seemed curious to me that in a life of thirty years I shouldhave been able to find, among the hundreds of women I had met,only one capable of creating in me that disquieting welter ofemotions which is called love, and hard that that one shouldreciprocate my feeling only to the extent of the mild liking whichAudrey entertained for me.

　　I tried to analyse her qualifications for the place she held in myheart. I had known women who had attracted me more physically, andwomen who had attracted me more mentally. I had known wiser women,handsomer women, more amiable women, but none of them had affectedme like Audrey. The problem was inexplicable. Any idea that wemight be affinities, soul-mates destined for each other from thebeginning of time, was disposed of by the fact that my attractionfor her was apparently in inverse ratio to hers for me. Forpossibly the millionth time in the past five years I tried topicture in my mind the man Sheridan, that shadowy wooer to whomshe had yielded so readily. What quality had he possessed that Idid not? Wherein lay the magnetism that had brought about histriumph?