e gone. That servant of yours,
Campbell, made a most efficient search, but there are no traces."

There was a long silence, at the end of which Herries uttered
another cry, but upon an entirely new note.

"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he said, "for here he
comes, along with your friend Fisher. They look as if they'd been
for a little walking tour."

The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of Fisher,
splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch like that of
a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and of the great and
gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and was interested in
Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond this bodily recognition,
March could make neither head nor tail of their presence or
demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch of nonsense to the
whole nightmare. The more closely he watched them, as they stood
listening to the revelations of the detective, the more puzzled he
was by their attitude--Fisher seemed grieved by the death of his
uncle, but hardly shocked at it; the older man seemed almost openly
thinking about something else, and neither had anything to suggest
about a further pursuit of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite
of the prodigious importance of the documents he had stolen. When
the detective had gone off to busy himself with that department of
the business, to telephone and write his report, when Herries had
gone back, probably to the brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had
blandly sauntered away toward a comfortable armchair in another part
of the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly to Harold March.

"My friend," he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there is
no one else I can trust so much as that. The journey will take us
most of the day, and the chief business cannot be done till
nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly on the way. But I
want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."

March and Fisher both had motor bicycles; and the first half of
their day's journey consisted in coasting eastward amid the
unconversational noise of those uncomfortable engines. But when they
came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern Kent, Fisher
stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy stream;
and they sat down to eat and to drink and to speak almost for the
first time. It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were singing in the
wood behind, and the sun shone full on their a