till well on in the next morning. But the force of what he had done came over him as he dressed. And lie became a lost child, with no idea what to do with himself that week. With a small bag he wandered into the Auckland station and took the first train out, without knowing where it was going. He was exceedingly hurt by the surly manner of the guard who thought him drunk because he had not got a ticket, did not know where the train was going, and could not say where he wanted to get off. He paid his fine and the fare for the whole distance to Wellington, though he had no intention of going there. He found he was on a train that was carrying officers and men to the Trentham camp. For a while he was a little distracted by their talk of the war, their speculation as to what was going to happen to themselves.
“Dear me, we’re all lost,” he thought.
Later in the day he got off at Hamilton in the Waikato. He had never been in Hamilton, and had never wanted to be in it, though it was a pretty little town, but he could not sit in the train another moment. After some enquiries he found an elderly man with a motor car who was at liberty to drive him anywhere he chose to go. The elderly man thought it strange that he had to think for some time before he decided on his destination, and wondered if he were in the secret service. Finally Dane said Rotorua, and paid him in advance, or his driver would have hesitated at setting out with so desperate-eyed a customer.
It occurred to Dane the next night, as he bathed the dust of his long drive off his weary body, that he had come in the wrong direction, that he would have to pass through Auckland in order to get home, and he must not do that after Valerie had come there. He was now morbidly afraid of meeting her. He was trying to blot her out of his consciousness. What a fool he had been to
