the sea.

Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the
shining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.

She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought,
started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to the
heart, and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the
wind, and passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes,
and was gone--she and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of
sand.

I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .

And suddenly I was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands
held up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening,
against the sky. . . .

For this striving, swift thing of light and beauty was Nettie--and
this was the man for whom I had been betrayed!

And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing
of my will--unavenged!

In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in
quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless
sand.

Section 5

I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village
I had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes. A door
slammed, the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.

There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others.
Into one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see
which. All had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed
a light.

This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the
reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against
the costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal
seaside resorts of that time. It was, you must understand, the custom
of the steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they
had been obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius
had hit upon the possibility of turning these into little habitable
cabins for the summer holiday. The thing had become a fashion with
a certain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and
these little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas
and supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the
brightest contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous
resorts. Of course there were many discomforts in such camping that
had to be faced cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred
to high spirits and the young. Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese