With startling suddenness the rigid form relaxed, eyes opened, head fell forward, arms dropped to the body. He ran fifty yards along the road, hesitated, plunged blindly through a clump of low gorse bushes, and fell prone in the middle of a grass ride.
"Stop where you are!" I called to the driver as I ran down the road and turned into the bridle-path.
The Seraph was lying with one foot caught in a tangle of bracken. He was conscious, but breathed painfully. I helped him upright, supported him with an arm round the body, and tried to lead him back to the car.
"This way!" he gasped, pointing down the ride. Half a mile away I caught sight of a creeper-covered bungalow—picturesque, peaceful, inanimate, but with its eastern aspect ruined by the presence of a new corrugated iron shed. I judged it to be a garage by the presence of green tins of motor spirit.
"She's there—Sylvia!" he panted, slowly recovering his breath as we walked down the bridle-path. "Go in and get her. Make them give her up!"
I looked at his torn, dusty clothes, his white face and dizzy eyes. At the fork of the road I had come near to being converted. It was another matter altogether to invade a strange house and call upon an unknown householder to yield up the person of a young woman who ought not to be there, who could only be there by an implied charge of felonious abduction, who probably was not there, who certainly was not there.... I am at heart conventional, decorous, sensitive to ridicule.
"We can't," I said weakly. "It's a strange house; we don't know that she's there; we might expose ourselves to an action for slander...."
He walked to the gate of the garden, freed himself from the support of my arm, and marched up to the front door. I took inglorious cover behind a walnut-tree and heard him knock. There was a pause. A window opened and closed; another pause, and the sound of feet approaching. Then the door opened.
"I have come for Miss Roden," I heard him say.
"Roden? Miss Roden? No one of that name lives here."