ook his head at it
wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state of passionate hunger,
which they solaced with captain's biscuits in the seclusion of their
bedrooms. Since they had Westgate almost to themselves, and the weather
was becoming bright and warm, they were much out of doors; but their
profound depression still continued, and they were as morbid human
beings as Max Nordau could have desired to meet with when he was seeking
for specimens of degeneration.

Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the details of their physical
and mental sensations drove them to seek one another's company, and soon
it became an understood thing that they should sit together on the lawn
or in the winter garden during the morning, and stroll feebly in the
direction of Margate during the breezy afternoon.

These times were times of battle, of a struggle for supremacy in
symptoms that led to much heart searching and to infinite exaggeration.
Mrs Lorton, being a woman, generally got the best of it, and Burnham
entered the hotel at tea-time with set teeth, and an appalling sense of
injustice and of failure in his breast. One night at dinner, determined
to conquer or to die, he refused everything but soup; and noted, with a
grim satisfaction, that Mrs Lorton could hardly contain her chagrin at
having inadvertently devoured a cutlet and a spoonful of jelly. Indeed,
her temper was so much upset by this occurrence that she went straight
to bed on leaving the coffee-room, and sent down a message the next
morning to say that she was far too ill to venture out.

Burnham, therefore, sat in the shelter alone, cursing the craft of
woman. In the intervals between the cursings he was conscious of a
certain loneliness that seemed to be in the atmosphere. It hovered with
the seagulls above the sprightly waves, swept over the lawn hand in hand
with the wind, basked in the sunshine, and companioned him closely upon
the esplanade as he walked home to lunch. He was puzzled by it.

At lunch-time Mrs Lorton was still confined to bed, so her maid
announced. Burnham promptly began to wonder whether she was going to
die. He strolled towards Margate wondering, and found himself presently
in the sunset, gazing with tears in his eyes at the silhouette of
Margate Pier, and, mentally, placing a reverent tribute of flowers from
Covent Garden upon her early grave in Brompton Cemetery.

He also found himself, later, dropping a tear at the thought of his ow