a.

Section 6

His bungalow beyond the golf links was, perhaps, a mile and a
quarter from the lane. We went down to the beach margin and along
the pallid wave-smoothed sands, and we got along by making a swaying,
hopping, tripod dance forward until I began to give under him, and
then, as soon as we could, sitting down. His ankle was, in fact,
broken, and he could not put it to the ground without exquisite
pain. So that it took us nearly two hours to get to the house,
and it would have taken longer if his butler-valet had not come
out to assist me. They had found motor-car and chauffeur smashed
and still at the bend of the road near the house, and had been on
that side looking for Melmount, or they would have seen us before.

For most of that time we were sitting now on turf, now on a chalk
boulder, now on a timber groin, and talking one to the other, with
the frankness proper to the intercourse of men of good intent,
without reservations or aggressions, in the common, open fashion
of contemporary intercourse to-day, but which then, nevertheless,
was the rarest and strangest thing in the world. He for the most
part talked, but at some shape of a question I told him--as plainly
as I could tell of passions that had for a time become incomprehensible
to me--of my murderous pursuit of Nettie and her lover, and how the
green vapors overcame me. He watched me with grave eyes and nodded
understandingly, and afterwards he asked me brief penetrating
questions about my education, my upbringing, my work. There was a
deliberation in his manner, brief full pauses, that had in them no
element of delay.

"Yes," he said, "yes--of course. What a fool I have been!" and said
no more until we had made another of our tripod struggles along
the beach. At first I did not see the connection of my story with
that self-accusation.

"Suppose," he said, panting on the groin, "there had been such a
thing as a statesman! . . ."

He turned to me. "If one had decided all this muddle shall end! If
one had taken it, as an artist takes his clay, as a man who builds
takes site and stone, and made------" He flung out his big broad hand
at the glories of sky and sea, and drew a deep breath, "something
to fit that setting."

He added in explanation, "Then there wouldn't have been such stories
as yours at all, you know. . . ."

"Tell me more about it," he said, "tell me all about yourself. I
feel all these things have passed away, all these thi