for the quiet
unhurried speech of his fellow-countrymen, for the sights and sounds and
general atmosphere of English life which for so long had been denied to
him. And the first thing he heard on entering the coffee-room of this
English hotel was the laugh of an American woman.

He had thought that in this remote corner of England--this little,
old-world fishing town, with its total lack of entertainment, its
unfashionable beach, and its wild North Sea breakers--no unit of the
great Western race would have set foot. He had believed its entire
absence of attraction to be a sure safeguard, and he was unfeignedly
disgusted to discover that this was not the case.

As he ate his dinner the high laugh broke in on his meditations again
and again, and his annoyance grew to a sense of savage irritation. He
had come over to England for a rest after a severe illness, and with
an intense craving, after his twenty years of stress and toil, to
stand aside and watch the world--the English, conservative world he
loved--dawdle by.

He wanted to bury himself in an unknown fishing-town and associate with
the simple, unflurried fisher-folk alone. It was a dream of his--a dream
which he had imagined near its fulfilment when he had arrived in the
peaceful little world of Old Silverstrand.

There was a large and fashionable watering-place five miles away. This
was New Silverstrand, a town of red brick, self-centred and prosperous.
But he had not thought that its visitors would have overflowed into the
old fishing-town. He himself saw no attraction there save the peace of
the shore and the turmoil of the sea. He had known and loved the old town
in his youth, long before the new one had been built or even thought
of. For New Silverstrand was a growth of barely ten years.

In all his wanderings his heart had always turned with a warm thrill of
memory to the little old fishing-town where much of his restless boyhood
had been spent. He had returned to it as to a familiar friend and found
it but slightly changed. A new hotel had been erected where the old
Crayfish Inn had once stood. And this, so far as he had been able to
judge in his first walk through the place on the evening of his arrival,
was the sole alteration.

He had heard that the shore had crumbled beyond the town, but he had left
that to be investigated on the morrow. The fishing-harbour was the same;
the brown-sailed fishing-boats rocked with the well-remembered swing
inside; t