He tried to suppose that this was what worried him, and why he felt such a nagging need to return. This, and some subconscious premonition that today was coming; his wound, the crash, and now the final check-up of his belongings and affairs. He should not have left home in such a hurry. It was untidy and careless and not like him. But the Home Office had been urgent on the telephone and he had packed an overnight bag and caught the London train from Wells in less than thirty minutes. It was only for a conference, they said. But in less than thirty hours he was crossing the Channel in an India Mail plane. That was June, 1936, and since then one thing had led to another for two years.

He must get back home. But why? His mind fumbled over it futilely for the hundredth time, and he wondered if fever was making him muzzy. But as for that, the unreasoning desire to return home had begun to torment him weeks before he got the wound. As much as four or five months ago, it had begun. And even then, he was never able to account for it, though it was so strong then that he had been tempted to throw up everything and take the first boat out of Calcutta. Half hunch, half dream, the thing would not down. Against his will he had allowed himself to be talked out of it by a worried high commissioner with an almost impossible job to be done. The impossible always appealed to Hilary because people looked so silly when he did it after all. He listened, he asked questions, he thought he saw a way— and so for the first time in his life he turned his back on a hunch, because it said “Go home!” and India said “Go on!”

His own instructions, telephoned back from London that June day to Mrs. Pilton, had been to lock up his room just as it stood, until his return. Not that it contained any such commonplace embarrassments as indiscreet correspondence or diaries. Keepsakes, yes, most of them untranslatable to the uninitiated, perhaps. Things he valued for their associations, like his butterflies and beetles pinned in their neat insect boxes; his stamp albums, lovingly toiled over for years past in childhood holidays; a few pressed plants in crumbling blotters—he had never quite got the hang of that. No birds’ eggs, no pop-gun victims. But a record for anyone to read of a boy’s eternal bower-bird instinct to accumulate and to hoard. Things he had lived with all his life. Bits and pieces of himself, which he would have given decent burial if he could have foreseen today. At least he should have taken time to supervise the dust-sheets as usual. He should have locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. But he had not expected to be away so long, nor to come so far.