The old girl had returned.
She must have returned, he reflected, almost as soon as he himself had dived into this place. She had started raising hell at the main gates, and must have got some way up the drive with her riding-crop before…
Well, he'd got to get out of this place. Martin tried again.
What drives a man frantic, even under the most ordinary circumstances, is that he cannot make speed even when he refrains from making haste. The more he says it to himself— slowly, slowly, no haste or you'll fumble — the more matters become snarled. The clock-hand crawls; the chance is lost
"If you are unable to get out of the Mirror Maze," Martin's memory brought back the words from the loud-speaker, "directions will be given by—"
Given by whom? Given how? He had heard no more.
Martin, trying to keep from a run and holding out his hands against obstacles, hurried always into a dead-end. His watch kept, ticking steadily, tiny digs of urgency. If only he hadn't come in here alone..
But he was not alone in the maze.
He discovered this as he whipped round the angle of a corridor, and stopped dead.
This corridor (his eye, used to it now, could judge accurately) was twenty feet long. Ahead of him, back to Martin, walked a man in a brown coat and blue trousers.