"Cherchez la femme," returned the Doctor.
"What makes you think so? It's not—"
"It's about the only errand a man can go on, and not be willing to take another chap along. And I'll bet anything I've got, except my girl and my buzz-cart, that it isn't the fair, false one we met at the hour of her elopement."
"Must be Rose, then," said the Colonel, half to himself, "but I thought nobody knew where she was."
"Love will find a way," hummed Doctor Jack. "I suppose you don't care to go for a ride this afternoon?"
"Not I," laughed the Colonel. "Why don't you take Juliet?"
"All right, since you ask me to. I wonder," he continued to himself, as he went toward Madame Bernard's at the highest rate of speed, "just how a fellow would go to work to find a woman who had left no address? Sixth sense, I suppose, or perhaps seventh or eighth."
Yet Allison was doing very well, with only the five senses of the normal human being to aid him in his search. He left the train at the sleepy little place known as "Holly Springs," and walked up the main road as though he knew the way.
"Half a mile," he said to himself, "and a little brown house in the woods with a brook singing in front of it. Ought to get to it pretty soon."
The prattling brook was half asleep in its narrow channel, but the gentle murmur was audible to one who stopped in the road to listen. It did not cross the road, but turned away, frightened, from the dusty highway of a modest civilisation, and went back into the woods, where it met another brook and travelled to the river in company.