She gripped the handle of the car’s door tightly, scarcely conscious that the car was coming to a standstill in a lonely street. As she managed to get the door open her captor, a rubber truncheon in his hand, hit her smartly across the back of the head. Violet did not know what had happened. She merely saw the flashes of vivid light which so often prelude violent unconsciousness, and then oblivion descended on her.

She came to in broad daylight. She was lying on a dirty bed in an untidy room. She sat up, but at once collapsed into a prone position again. Her head ached, and her every limb felt as if it had been passed through some machine which had mangled them terribly.

Gradually, however, she mastered her nausea, and sat up. She was in a small room, white-washed long ago, but now with walls of an indeterminate grey.

Besides the bed, the room contained merely a chair and a small occasional table. It was uncarpeted, and there was merely a small piece of oilcloth, of a grotesquely ugly pattern, beside the table, and was obviously meant for her to stand on when performing her toilette, for on the table there was resting a large jug of water and a basin, in which she splashed her face and hands, then feeling considerably better to face whatever might be coming her way.

She staggered to the window, which was barred on the outside, and then looked around. She was in the country, but what country she could not tell. Before her eyes was stretched a wide panorama of hill and vale. The hills were of an uneven brown colour, fading away into black in the distance, save where outcrops of cruel granite stuck grey fingers through the sparse, brown grass. A brown road stretched its ribbon length away into the distance, and immediately below her, outside the front door of the house, she supposed, was a low, racing car—presumably that which had brought her here from London.

There was only one grain of comfort to be extracted from the situation. She was still in England, for they would never have dared to take the car out of the country. The risk of shipping it would have been too great. Still, she might be almost anywhere. Certainly she had never seen anything like this bitter, grim landscape in her life before. It even exceeded in cruelty the Mendip Hills of her childhood and the Dartmoor village where she had once, in her schooldays, spent a holiday.

The door opened, and a man entered. It was the man who had captured her the night before. His hair was now brushed more or less tidily. His beard was a little more neatly trimmed. In fact, he looked almost civilised. But still the fire of enmity burned in his steady eyes.