burdened with a tremendous thought.

The thought was:

"I've gone and done it this time!"

Now that the transaction was accomplished and could not be undone, he
admitted to himself that he had never been more mad. He could scarcely
comprehend what had led him to do that which he had done. But he
obscurely imagined that his caprice for the possession of sea-going
craft must somehow be the result of his singular adventure with the
pantechnicon in the canal at Bursley. He was so preoccupied with
material interests as to be capable of forgetting, for a quarter of an
hour at a stretch, that in all essential respects his life was wrecked,
and that he had nothing to hope for save hollow worldly success. He knew
that Ruth would return the ring. He could almost see the postman holding
the little cardboard cube which would contain the rendered ring. He had
loved, and loved tragically. (That was how he put it--in his unspoken
thoughts; but the truth was merely that he had loved something too
expensive.) Now the dream was done. And a man of disillusion walked
along the Parade towards St Asaph's Road among revellers, a man with a
past, a man who had probed women, a man who had nothing to learn about
the sex. And amid all the tragedy of his heart, and all his
apprehensions concerning hollow, worldly success, little thoughts of
absurd unimportance kept running about like clockwork mice in his head.
Such as that it would be a bit of a bore to have to tell people at
Bursley that his engagement, which truly had thrilled the town, was
broken off. Humiliating, that! And, after all, Ruth was a glittering gem
among women. Was there another girl in Bursley so smart, so effective,
so truly ornate?

Then he comforted himself with the reflection: "I'm certainly the only
man that ever ended an engagement by just saying 'Rothschild!'" This was
probably true. But it did not help him to sleep.

II

The next morning at 5.20 the youthful sun was shining on the choppy
water of the Irish Sea, just off the Little Orme, to the west of
Llandudno Bay. Oscillating on the uneasy waves was Denry's lifeboat,
manned by the nodding bearded head, three ordinary British longshoremen,
a Norwegian who could speak English of two syllables, and two other
Norwegians who by a strange neglect of education could speak nothing but
Norwegian.

Close under the headland, near a morsel of beach lay the remains of the
_Hjalmar_ in an attitude of repose. It was as if t