night, could imagine their bleak desolation,
could almost feel the cold thrill of their loneliness.

Craven stretched out his hand and took one of hers and held it.

"Why do you do that?" she said. "You don't care for me really."

He pressed her hand. He wanted to kiss her at that moment. His youth,
the game they had played together, this isolation and nearness, the
oncoming night--they all seemed to be working together, pushing him
towards her mysteriously. But just at that moment on the sands close to
them two dark figures appeared, a fisherman in his Sunday best walking
with his girl. They did not see Miss Van Tuyn and Craven on the
sandbank. With their arms spread round each other's waists, and slightly
lurching in the wind, they walked slowly on, sinking at each step a
little in the sand. Their red faces looked bovine in the twilight.

Almost mechanically Craven's fingers loosened on Miss Van Tuyn's hand.
She, too, was chilled by this vision of Sunday love, and her hand came
away from his.

"They are having their Sunday out," she said, with a slight, cold laugh.
"And we have had ours!"

And she got up and shook the sand grains from her rough skirt.

"And that's happiness!" she added, almost with a sneer.

Like him she felt angry and almost tricked, hostile to the working of
sex, vulgarized by the sight of that other drawing together of two human
beings. Oh! the ineptitude of the echoes we are! Now she was irritated
with Craven because he had taken her hand. And yet she had been on the
edge of a great experiment. She knew that Craven did not love her--yet.
Perhaps he would never really love her. Certainly she did not love him.
And yet that day she had come out from London with a desire to take
refuge in him. It almost amounted to that. When they started she had not
known exactly what she was going to do. But she had set Craven, the safe
man, the man whom she could place, could understand, could certainly
trust up to a point, in her mind against Arabian, the unsafe man,
whom she could not place, could not understand, could not trust.
And, mentally, she had clung to Craven. And if those two bovine
sentimentalists had not intruded flat-footed upon the great waste of
Camber and the romance of the coming night, and Craven had yielded to
his impulse and had kissed her, she might have clung to him in very
truth. And then? She might have been protected against Arabian. But
evidently it was not to be. At the critical