e Reality the Vision? Deep within her she felt
something--her soul, herself, she knew not what--thrill and turn over and
settle again....

"The sea," she repeated in a low voice.

"Yes, that's what you want to set you up--rather! Do you remember that
fortnight at Littlehampton, you and me and your Aunt? Jolly that was! I
like Littlehampton. It isn't flash like Brighton, and Margate's always so
beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I
did love you that afternoon, Bessie!"...

He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why
the words "the sea" were somehow part of it all--the pins and brooches
of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of
hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of "Warm, warm,
warmer!" had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was
getting warm--positively hot....

He had ceased to talk, and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought
of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought
him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness, and closed
her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded something. Then she said quickly,
"Is tea nearly ready, Ed?" and, as he turned to the table, took up the
book again.

She felt that even to touch that book brought her "warmer." It fell open
at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the
babble his words had evoked, of the pierrots and banjos and minstrels of
Margate and Littlehampton. It was to hear a gladder, wilder tumult that
she sat once more so still, so achingly listening....

_"The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills
From kissing cymbals made a merry din--"_

The words seemed to move on the page. In her eyes another light than the
firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat
a little inarticulate sound twanged.

"Eh? Did you speak, Bessie?" Ed asked, stopping in his buttering of
bread.

"Eh?... No."

In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him.
Suddenly it struck her with force: what a shaving of a man he was!
Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little "important" lip
and chin--yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course! Then she
remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as
in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy
water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, fling