The wind had dropped but no gleam of sunshine interrupted the monotonous stretch of grey sky, grey dunes and grey sea, as the sisters with their two companions strolled slowly in the late afternoon along the Rodmoor sands.

Linda was a little pale and silent, and Nance fancied she discerned now and again, in the glances Miss Doorm threw upon her, a certain sinister exultation, but she was prevented from watching either of them very closely by reason of the extraordinary excitement which the occasion seemed to arouse in Sorio. He kept shouting bits of poetry, some of which Nance caught the drift of, while others—they might have been Latin or Greek, for all she knew—conveyed nothing to her but a vague feeling of insecurity. He was like an excited magician uttering incantations and invoking strange gods.

The sea was neither rough nor calm. Wisps of tossed-up foam appeared and disappeared at far distant points in its vast expanse, and every now and then the sombre horizon was broken in its level line by the emergence of a wave larger and darker than the rest.

Flocks of gulls disturbed by their approach rose, wheeling and screaming, from their feeding-grounds on the stranded seaweed and flapped away over the water.

The four friends advanced along the hard sand, close to the changing line of the tide’s retreat, and from the blackened windrow there, of broken shells and anonymous sea refuse they stopped, each one of them, at different moments, to pick up some particular object which attracted or surprised them. It was Nance who was the first to become aware that they were not the only frequenters of that solitude. She called Adrian’s attention to two figures moving along the edge of the sand-dunes and apparently, from the speed with which they advanced, anxious to reach a protruding headland and disappear from observation.

Adrian stopped and surveyed the figures long and intently. Then to her immense surprise, and it must be confessed a little to her consternation, he started off at a run in pursuit of them. His long, lean, hatless figure assumed so emphatic and strange an appearance as he crossed the intervening sands that Linda burst into peals of laughter.

“I wish they’d run away from him,” she cried. “We should see a race! Who are they? Does he know them?”

Nance made no reply, but Miss Doorm, who had been watching the incident with sardonic interest, muttered under her breath, “It’s begun, has it? Soon enough, in all conscience!”

Nance turned sharply upon her. “What do you mean, Rachel? Does Adrian know them? Do you know who they are?”

No answer was vouchsafed to this, nor indeed was one necessary, for the mystery, whatever it was, was on the point of resolving itself. Adrian had overtaken the objects of his pursuit and was bringing them back with him, one on either hand. Nance was not long in making out the general characteristics of the strangers. They were both women, one elderly, the other quite young, and from what she could see of their appearance and dress, they were clearly ladies. It was not, however, till they came within speaking distance that the girl’s heart began to beat an unmistakable danger-signal. This happened directly she obtained a definite view of the younger of Adrian’s companions. Before any greeting could be given Rachel had whispered abruptly into her ear, “They’re the Renshaws—I haven’t seen them since Philippa was a child, but they’re the Renshaws. He must have met them this morning. Look out for yourself, dearie.”

Nance only vaguely heard her. Every fibre of attention in her body and soul was fixed upon that slender equivocal figure by Adrian’s side.

The introduction which followed was of a sufficiently curious character. Between Nance and the young woman designated by Rachel as Philippa there was an exchange of glances when their fingers touched like the crossing of two naked blades. Mrs. Renshaw retained Linda’s hand in her own longer than convention required, and Linda herself seemed to cling to the brown-eyed, grey-haired lady with a movement of childish confidence. Nance was calm enough, for all the beating of her heart, to remark as an interesting fact that her rival’s mother, though oppressively timid and retiring in her manner towards them all, seemed to exercise a quelling and restraining influence upon Rachel Doorm, who began at once speaking to her with unusual deference and respect. The whole party, after some desultory conversation, began to drift away from the sea towards the town and Nance found herself in spite of some furtive efforts to the contrary, wedged closely in between Mrs. Renshaw and Rachel—with Linda walking in front of them—as they followed the narrow uneven path between the sand-dunes and the heavy sand of the upper shore.

Every now and then Mrs. Renshaw would bend down and call their attention to some little sea plant, telling them its name in slow sweet tones, as if repeating some liturgical formula, and indicating into what precise colour its pale glaucous buds would unsheathe as the weather grew warm.

On these occasions Nance quickly turned her head; but do what she could, she could only grow helplessly conscious that Adrian and his companion were slipping further and further behind.

Once, as the tender-voiced lady touched lightly, with the tips of her ungloved fingers, a cluster of insignificant leaves and asked Nance if she knew the lesser rock-rose the agitated girl found herself on the point of uttering a strangely irrelevant cry.

“Rose au regard saphique,” her confused heart murmured, “plus pÂle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginitÉ, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence.”

They approached at last the entrance of the little harbour, and to Nance’s ineffable relief Mrs. Renshaw paused and made them sit down on a fish-smelling bench, among coils of rope, and wait the appearance of the missing ones.

The tide was low and between great banks of mud the water rushed sea-ward in a narrow, swirling current. A heavy fishing smack with high tarred sides and red, unfurled sails, was being steered down this channel by two men armed with enormous poles. Through the masts of several other boats, moored to iron rings in the wooden wharf, and between the slate roofs of some ramshackle houses on the other side, they got a glimpse, looking westward across the fens, of a low, rusty-red streak of sombrely illuminated sky. This apparently was all the sunset Rodmoor was destined to know that evening and Nance, as she listened vaguely to Mrs. Renshaw’s gentle voice describing to Linda the various “queer characters” among the harbour people, had a strange, bewildered sense of being carried far and far and far down a remorseless tide, with a heavy sky above her and interminable grey sands around her, and all the while something withheld, withdrawn, inexplicable in the power that bore her forward.

They came at last—Adrian and Philippa Renshaw, and Nance had, in one heart-rending moment, the pitiless suspicion that the battle was lost already and that this fragile thing with the great ambiguous eyes and the reserved manner, this thing whose slender form and tight-braided, dusky hair might have belonged to a masquerading boy, had snatched from her already what could never for all the years of her life be won again!

As they left the harbour and entered the main village street, Adrian made one or two deliberate efforts to detach Nance from the rest. He pointed out little things to her in the homely shop-windows and seemed surprised and disappointed when she made no response to his overtures. She could not make any response. She could not bring herself so much as to look into his face. It was not from any capricious pride or mere feminine pique that she thus turned away but from a profound and lamentable numbness of every emotion. The wound seemed to have gone further even than she herself had known. Her heart felt like a dead cold weight—like a murdered, unborn child—beneath her breast, and out of her lethargy and inertness, as in certain tragic dreams, she could not move. Her limbs seemed formed of lead, and her lips—at least as far as he was concerned—became those of a dumb animal.

A man, viewing the situation from outside, the slightness and apparent triviality of the incident, would have been astounded at the effect upon her of so insubstantial a blow, but women move in a different world, a world where the drifting of the tiniest straw is indicative of crushing catastrophes, and to the instinct of the least sensitive among women Nance’s premonitions would have been quite explicable.

It was at that moment that it was sharply borne in upon her how slight her actual knowledge of her lover was. Her absorption in him was devoted and complete but in regard to the intricacies and complications of his character she was as much in the dark to-day as when they first met in London Bridge Road.

Strangely enough, in the paralysis of her feelings, Nance was unconscious of any definite antagonism to the cause of her distress. She found she could talk quite naturally and spontaneously to Miss Renshaw when chance threw them together as they emerged upon the village green.

“Oh, I like those trees!” she cried, as the row of ancient sycamores which gave the forlorn little square its chief appeal first struck her attention.

The cottage of Baltazar Stork, it turned out, was just behind these sycamores and next door to the building which, with its immense and faded sign-board, offered the natives of Rodmoor their unique dissipation. “The Admiral’s Head!” Nance repeated, surveying the sign and thinking to herself that it must have been under that somewhat sordid roof that Miss Doorm’s parent had drunk himself to death.

“Don’t look at it,” she heard Mrs. Renshaw say. “I feel ashamed every time I pass it.”

Philippa gave Nance a quick and rather bitter smile.

“Mother is telling them that it is our beer which they sell there. You know we are brewers, don’t you? Mother thinks it her duty to remind every one of that fact. She gets a curious pleasure out of talking about it. It’s her morbid conscience. You’ll find we’re all rather morbid here,” she added, looking searchingly into Nance’s face.

“It’s the sea. Our sea is not the same as other seas. It eats into us.”

“Why do you say just that—and in that tone—to me?” Nance gravely enquired, answering the other’s gaze. “My father was a sailor. I love the salt-water.”

Philippa Renshaw shrugged her shoulders. “You may love being on it. That’s a different thing. It remains to be seen how you like being near it.”

“I like it always, everywhere,” repeated Nance obstinately, “and I’m afraid of nothing it can do to me!”

They overtook the others at this point and Mrs. Renshaw turned rather querulously to her daughter.

“Don’t talk to her about the sea, Philippa—I know that’s what you’re doing.”

The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and Nance felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than before, as she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.

It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,” she said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses now, they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the land all the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the town, I am sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I lived here in old days.”

Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.

“Well,” she said, “we must be getting home for dinner. Shall we walk through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way—if the grass isn’t too wet.”

In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not surprised when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the others. He professed to be going to the station to meet the Mundham train.

“Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be at hand to help.”

Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted and a cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting that under the suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm there lurked a wish that it had been the more docile and less difficult child that fate had given her for a daughter.

Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel. She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite savage protest.

“She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental about young girls. Wait till you find her with some one younger than you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”

“She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm looked at them gravely.

“I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed there aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both pray to God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause of others before long.”

She glanced at Nance significantly.

“Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”

Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.

Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral saw the shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded countenance, with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he could catch between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and if Rodmoor had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead instead of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown and all that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more casually, more contemptuously.