accordingly did, and leaving
Marseilles the next morning about eight, found himself at Nice early in
the afternoon.

Now that he was actually at the centre of his gravitation he seemed even
further away from a feasible meeting with her than in England. While
afar off, his presence at Nice had appeared to be the one thing needful
for the solution of his trouble, but the very house fronts seemed now to
ask him what right he had there. Unluckily, in writing from England, he
had not allowed her time to reply before his departure, so that he
did not know what difficulties might lie in the way of her seeing him
privately. Before deciding what to do, he walked down the Avenue de la
Gare to the promenade between the shore and the Jardin Public, and sat
down to think.

The hotel which she had given him as her address looked right out upon
him and the sea beyond, and he rested there with the pleasing hope that
her eyes might glance from a window and discover his form. Everything
in the scene was sunny and gay. Behind him in the gardens a band was
playing; before him was the sea, the Great sea, the historical and
original Mediterranean; the sea of innumerable characters in history and
legend that arranged themselves before him in a long frieze of memories
so diverse as to include both AEneas and St. Paul.

Northern eyes are not prepared on a sudden for the impact of such images
of warmth and colour as meet them southward, or for the vigorous
light that falls from the sky of this favoured shore. In any other
circumstances the transparency and serenity of the air, the perfume of
the sea, the radiant houses, the palms and flowers, would have acted
upon Somerset as an enchantment, and wrapped him in a reverie; but at
present he only saw and felt these things as through a thick glass which
kept out half their atmosphere.

At last he made up his mind. He would take up his quarters at her
hotel, and catch echoes of her and her people, to learn somehow if their
attitude towards him as a lover were actually hostile, before formally
encountering them. Under this crystalline light, full of gaieties,
sentiment, languor, seductiveness, and ready-made romance, the memory of
a solitary unimportant man in the lugubrious North might have faded from
her mind. He was only her hired designer. He was an artist; but he had
been engaged by her, and was not a volunteer; and she did not as yet
know that he meant to accept no return for his labours but