The Professor lunched with keen enjoyment. His adventure was giving him an appetite. In spite of the amount of travelling which he had done during the last couple of days he felt thoroughly fit and well, much better than he had during the winter in town. The menace which had been revealed to him seemed far away to him in this peaceful spot, it almost seemed to him as though the whole of his discoveries had been merely some impossible dream, the penalty of overwork, and that the fresh country air, tinged with the faintly salt tang of the sea, had swept it from his brain into the realms of the unreal. Perhaps, after all, he was entirely wrong in his deductions. Those mysterious murders in Praed Street might have been the result of some entirely different influence. He had merely conjecture to guide him: somehow, now he had reached the place where alone the corroborative facts could be gathered, it seemed as though his actions and his fears were the effect of a sudden and unaccountable impulse.