Constabulary, a big, burly man named Freeman, whom he knew well, and who frequently was an attendant at church.

He, of course, told him nothing of the reappearance of Gordon Gray, but simply related the fact that Roddy had left the church on Sunday night, and with the exception of being seen in the Guildford road two hours later, had completely disappeared.

“That’s peculiar!” remarked the dark-bearded man in uniform. “But I dare say there’s some explanation, sir. You’ll no doubt get a wire or a letter in the morning.” Then he added: “Mr Roddy is young, you know, sir. Perhaps there’s a lady in the case! When a young man disappears we generally look for the lady—and usually we find her!”

“Roddy has but few female friends,” replied the old rector. “He is not the sort of lad to disappear and leave me in anxiety.”

“Well, sir, if you like, I’ll phone into Guildford and circulate his description,” Freeman said. “But personally I think that he’ll come back before to-morrow.”

“Why?”

“Well—I know Mr Roddy. And I agree that he would never cause you, his father, an instant’s pain if he could help it. He’s away by force of circumstances, depend upon it!”

Force of circumstances! The inspector’s words caused him to ponder. Were those circumstances his meeting with Gordon Gray for the first time that night?

Roddy, he knew, had never met Gray. The man’s very existence he had hidden from his son. And Roddy was abroad when, in those later years, the two men had met. The old rector of Little Farncombe felt bewildered. A crowd of difficulties had, of late, fallen upon him, as they more or less fall upon everybody in every walk of life at one time or another. We all of us have our “bad times,” and Norton Homfray’s was a case in point. Financial troubles had been succeeded by the rising of the ghosts of the past, and followed by the vanishing of his only son.

Three eager, breathless, watchful days went by, but no word came from the fine well-set-up young man who had led such a daring and adventurous life in South America. More than ever was his father convinced that old Hughes was correct in his surmise. He had stood upon the pathway of the Guildford road—the old tar-macked highway which leads from London to Portsmouth—and had been approached by Gordon Gray, the man who meant to expose his father to the parishioners. The world of the Reverend 

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