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“I should have had an amusing drive,” I said. “It would be worth while. Perhaps you would tell me what Doctor Cook says, when you return.”

They laughed again, hesitated quite a time, then accepted the invitation. It was arranged that we should start at ten o’clock, when few people would be abroad outside the city, where we should have to travel with lights out to avoid the police. There still remained an hour or so. We had dinner, talked of Doctor Cook, and at ten o’clock started out in the taxi, and I thought how incredible it was that I should be sitting there, opposite a beautiful lady with a silver fox round her throat, with a laughing girl by her side, and a young Danish explorer next to the driver, riding through Denmark with lights out, to meet a man who had discovered the North Pole, and whose name I had never heard two days before. These things happen only in journalism and romance.

We had not gone very far when, driving through a village, we knocked over a man on a bicycle. People came running up through the darkness. Peter Freuchen leaped down from his seat to pick up the man, who seemed to be uninjured, and there was a great chatter in the Danish tongue, while I kept on shouting to Freuchen, “How much to pay?” After a while he resumed his seat and said, “Nodings to pay!” So we went on again, and after a long, cold drive without further incident, reached Elsinore, where Hamlet saw his father’s ghost.