himself too early for his appointment with
Sir Howard, and was not disinclined to see the end of his new
friend's experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the
moorland behind them, and half the white road was gray in the great
shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars
shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that clear noon,
manufacturing their own midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to
appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the trees thinned and
fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular
copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing
away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on they came to
the first turn of the road.

At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of The
Grapes. The signboard was dark and indecipherable by now, and hung
black against the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as
inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a tavern
for vinegar instead of wine.

"A good phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be if you were silly
enough to drink wine in it. But the beer is very good, and so is the
brandy."

March followed him to the bar parlor with some wonder, and his dim
sense of repugnance was not dismissed by the first sight of the
innkeeper, who was widely different from the genial innkeepers of
romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black mustache, but with
black, restless eyes. Taciturn as he was, the investigator succeeded
at last in extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and minutely on the
subject of motor cars. He evidently regarded the innkeeper as in
some singular way an authority on motor cars; as being deep in the
secrets of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement of motor
cars; holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the
Ancient Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious conversation
there did emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular
motor car, of a given description, had stopped before the inn about
an hour before, and that an elderly man had alighted, requiring some
mechanical assistance. Asked if the visitor required any other
assistance, the innkeeper said shortly that the old gentleman had
filled his flask and taken a packet of sandwiches. And with these
words the somewhat inhospitable host had walked hastily out of the
bar, and they heard him banging door