Black peat-bogs filled the hollows; grey stone homesteads, lonely and forbidding, stood out here and there against the curved sky-line.

Even the high road was uneven and in places flooded.

For an hour I passed hardly a soul.

At last, near a crossroad with a defaced finger-post, I descended from my machine, and consulted my ordnance map, on which Mrs.Mallet had marked ominously, with a cross of red rink, the exact position of the little fishing hamlet where Hugo used to spend his holidays.

I took the turning which seemed to me most likely to lead to it; but the tracks were so confused, and the run of the lanes so uncertain--let alone the map being some years out of date--that I soon felt I had lost my bearings.