are they now?"

"They?... oh, him and Sally! They said they'd go and see if Tishy
and her husband were blown away."

"Well, I have had my sleep out with a vengeance. It's a quarter
to ten."

"Never mind, darling. So much the better. Let's have a look at
you...." And the little self-explanatory colloquy ends with Rosalind
kissing her husband and examining him with anxious eyes. She sees
a face less haggard than the one she saw last night, for is it not
daylight and has not the wind fallen to a mere cheerful breeze you can
quite stand upright in, leaning slightly seawards? And are not the
voices and the footsteps of a new day outside, and the swift exchanges
of sunlight and cloud-shadow that are chasing each other off the
British Channel? And has not a native of eighty years of age (which
he ignores) just opened the street door on his own responsibility
and shouted along the passage that pra'ans are large this morning? He
is more an institution than a man, and is freely spoken of as "The
Shrimps." A flavour of a Triton who has got too dry on the beach comes
in with the sea air, and also a sense of prawns, emptied from a wooden
measure they have been honourably shaken down into, falling on a dish
held out to receive them by an ambassador of four, named by Sally
little Miss Lobjoit, the youngest of her race.

But for all that the rising life of the hours and the subsiding gale
may do to chase away the memory of the oppressions of the night from
one who was defenceless in its solitude, Rosalind can see how much
they leave behind. Her husband may do his best to make light of it--to
laugh it off as nothing but the common bad night we all know so well;
may make the most of the noises of the storm, and that abominable
banging door; but he will not conceal from her the effort that it
costs him to do so. Besides, had he not admitted, in the night, that
he "got worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas"? What were these ideas?
How far had he penetrated into his own past? She was not sorry for the
few words she had had time to exchange with Dr. Conrad while Sally
went to seek her hat. She had renewed and confirmed her permission to
him to speak to her husband freely about himself.

"Are Mr. and Mrs. Paganini gone to sea?" This is said as Fenwick opens
negotiations rather mechanically with the fresh coffee Mrs. Lobjoit
has produced, and as that lady constructs for removal a conglomerate
of plates and effete eggs.

"Gone to sea,