ce. Solitude
had been his best friend. He wanted some place where he could sit down
and be alone. And in his need his thoughts turned to the sea which had
given him so much of that congenial solitude. There, if always with his
ship (but that was an integral part of him) he could always be as
solitary as he chose. Yes. Get out to sea!

The night of the town with its strings of lights, rigid, and crossed
like a net of flames, thrown over the sombre immensity of walls, closed
round him, with its artificial brilliance overhung by an emphatic
blackness, its unnatural animation of a restless, overdriven humanity.
His thoughts which somehow were inclined to pity every passing figure,
every single person glimpsed under a street lamp, fixed themselves at
last upon a figure which certainly could not have been seen under the
lamps on that particular night. A figure unknown to him. A figure shut
up within high unscaleable walls of stone or bricks till next morning
... The figure of Flora de Barral's father. De Barral the financier--
the convict.

There is something in that word with its suggestions of guilt and
retribution which arrests the thought. We feel ourselves in the
presence of the power of organised society--a thing mysterious in itself
and still more mysterious in its effect. Whether guilty or innocent, it
was as if old de Barral had been down to the Nether Regions. Impossible
to imagine what he would bring out from there to the light of this world
of uncondemned men. What would he think? What would he have to say?
And what was one to say to him?

Anthony, a little awed, as one is by a range of feelings stretching
beyond one's grasp, comforted himself by the thought that probably the
old fellow would have little to say. He wouldn't want to talk about it.
No man would. It must have been a real hell to him.

And then Anthony, at the end of the day in which he had gone through a
marriage ceremony with Flora de Barral, ceased to think of Flora's
father except, as in some sort, the captive of his triumph. He turned
to the mental contemplation of the white, delicate and appealing face
with great blue eyes which he had seen weep and wonder and look
profoundly at him, sometimes with incredulity, sometimes with doubt and
pain, but always irresistible in the power to find their way right into
his breast, to stir there a deep response which was something more than
love--he said to himself,--as men understand it