etimes
concealed their original gaiety, as if it were original sin, and
pretended to a cruel cynicism; yet at heart, it must be confessed, they
were as lively as poor children playing in the street. But when they
went to Westgate, influenza had had its fill of them, and the infinite
pathos of the world, and of all that is therein, appealed to them with a
seizing vitality. Burnham, on the Thursday, was moved to tears at
Birchington Station by the sight of a mother and eleven children missing
the last train to Margate. Harriet Lorton, on the following Friday, had
hysterics at Victoria, when she perceived a young lady drop a cage
containing a grey parrot, and smash the bird's china bath upon the
platform. The fact that the parrot had been actually taking its bath at
the moment, and was left by the misfortune in much confusion and no
water, struck her so poignantly as nearly to break her heart. She wept
in a first-class carriage all the way down, and arrived at Westgate,
towards ten o'clock, in a state of complete collapse.

Mr Burnham was in bed drinking a cup of soup at this time. He heard the
luggage being carried up, but did not suspect whose it was.
Nevertheless, the ravages of disease led him to consider the slight
noise and bustle a personal insult, and he lay awake most of the night
brooding upon the wrongs of which he, erroneously, believed himself to
be the victim.

It was on the next morning that the two invalids met back to back in a
shelter with glass partitions upon the lawn.

Mrs Lorton, smothered in wraps, had taken up her position on the bench
that faces Westgate without noticing a bowed and ulstered figure, shod
in brown boots, sitting in a haggard posture on the reciprocal bench
that faces the sea. Nobody was about, for it was not the season, and Mrs
Lorton began slowly to weep on account of the loneliness. It struck her
disordered fancy as so personal. Creation was sending her to Coventry.
At her back the tears ran over Burnham's handsome countenance. He was
staring at the sea, and thinking of all the people who had been drowned
in water since the days of the Deluge. He wondered how many there were,
and cried copiously, considering himself absolutely alone and free to
give vent to his feelings, which struck him as splendidly human.

When two people weep together one of them usually weeps louder than the
other, and, on this occasion, Burnham made the most noise. He became,
in fact, so uproariously sol