As soon as he reached Preston Lane, Wolf looked at his watch under the first of the three lampposts which were all the illumination that Blacksod had bestowed on that humble district. It was a quarter past nine. He must have been more than an hour in the cornfield; for he had left the bowling-green at seven.
“He’s been with Gerda.” This single thought had brought him from the centre of the town to where he now stood, without consciousness of anything in the world except one solitary fish’s eye—glazed and staring—that he had caught a glimpse of on a gas-lit counter.