“Excuse me,” said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet. “I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to know. It's quite out of proportion to the comparatively small distance.”
“Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”
“I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a timetable?”
“You don't seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. “You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton Common, do you? You can't mean that!”
“Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling.
“Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
“To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,” said Basil Grant. “I thought you wanted to find him?”
Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on the floor. “And in order to find him,” he said, “you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know he can't be.”
The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on with a reiterated gesture:
“He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he has just been systematically looked for and where we know that he is not to be found—and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to go.”