a made. It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards.
Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw. The tide
ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw
noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was
re-created. This play went on endlessly, hypnotising the spectators
who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe,
at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness.
Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence,
the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure,
strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.

Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned
against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of
the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the
bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his
mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to
Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade. "Why am I
doing this?" he asked himself again and again. "Why don't I go home? I
must be mad to be doing this." Still his legs carried him on, past
lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost
deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels
were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier,
which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and
opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps:
Regency Square. He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of
it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street.
He went hot and cold.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEVEN.

Well, and what then? Preston Street was dark and lonely. The wind
charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs. He was in
Preston Street, but what could he do? She was behind the black walls of
one of those houses. But what then? Could he knock at the door in the
night and say: "I've come. I don't know why?"

He said: "I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go
back to the hotel. That's the only thing to do. I've gone off my head,
that's what's the matter with me! I ought to have written to her. Why
in the name of God didn't I begin by writing to her? ... Of course I