went to the
station and asked questions of the outporters there. But outporters,
I found, were a class of men who remembered luggage rather than
people, and I had no sort of idea what luggage young Verrall and
Nettie were likely to have with them.

Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old
man with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the
beach from the parade. He knew much about young couples, but only
in general terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I
sought. He reminded me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous
aspects of life, and I was not sorry when presently a gunboat
appeared in the offing signalling the coastguard and the camp, and
cut short his observations upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade,
and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire
that made the ruddy west seem tame. My midday lassitude was going,
my blood was running warmer again. And as the twilight and that filmy
brightness replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar
place of all its matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless
materialism, romance returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts
of honor and revenge. I remember that change of mood as occurring
very vividly on this occasion, but I fancy that less distinctly I
had felt this before many times. In the old times, night and the
starlight had an effect of intimate reality the daytime did not possess.
The daytime--as one saw it in towns and populous places--had hold
of one, no doubt, but only as an uproar might, it was distracting,
conflicting, insistent. Darkness veiled the more salient aspects of
those agglomerations of human absurdity, and one could exist--one
could imagine.

I had a queer illusion that night, that Nettie and her lover were
close at hand, that suddenly I should come on them. I have already
told how I went through the dusk seeking them in every couple that
drew near. And I dropped asleep at last in an unfamiliar bedroom
hung with gaudily decorated texts, cursing myself for having wasted
a day.

Section 3

I sought them in vain the next morning, but after midday I came in
quick succession on a perplexing multitude of clues. After failing
to find any young couple that corresponded to young Verrall
and Nettie, I presently discovered an unsatisfactory quartette of
couples.

Any of these four couples might hav