Suddenly he roused himself, turned over the map in the map-case beside him, and tried to find his position....
So far as he could judge he had strayed right into Suffolk....
About one o'clock in the morning he found himself in Newmarket. Newmarket too was a moonlit emptiness, but as he hesitated at the cross-roads he became aware of a policeman standing quite stiff and still at the corner by the church.
"Matching's Easy?" he cried.
"That road, Sir, until you come to Market Saffron, and then to the left...."
Mr. Britling had a definite purpose now in his mind, and he drove faster, but still very carefully and surely. He was already within a mile or so of Market Saffron before he remembered that he had made a kind of appointment with himself at Pyecrafts. He stared at two conflicting purposes. He turned over certain possibilities.
At the Market Saffron cross-roads he slowed down, and for a moment he hung undecided.
"Oliver," he said, and as he spoke he threw over his steering-wheel towards the homeward way.... He finished his sentence when he had negotiated the corner safely. "Oliver must have her...."
And then, perhaps fifty yards farther along, and this time almost indignantly: "She ought to have married him long ago...."
He put his automobile in the garage, and then went round under the black shadow of his cedars to the front door. He had no key, and for a long time he failed to rouse his wife by flinging pebbles and gravel at her half-open window. But at last he heard her stirring and called out to her.