But three or four spits of land shut off that human, if vulgar,
resort. Between me and the Pyrenees this immense ghastly
sarcophagus of misdirected enterprise possessed the landscape,
and I approached it. Yes, Roddy:"

Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.

"The horrible place turned out to be a mask--as I hope the Dark
Tower did, after all, for Childe Roland. But it was a horrible
mask. It had been started on foundations of good stone, with
true French lordliness: but it parodied--or, rather, it
satirised--the ambitious French tendency to impose architecture
upon nature. Behind the facade, through which the wind
whistled, all was an unroofed mass of rusted girders and joists;
a skeleton framework about which I climbed--the first and last
guest--conning and guessing where suites of rooms had been
planned, to be adorned with Louis Seize furniture, for a host of
fellow-guests that had never come and now would never arrive to
make merry. I clambered along a girder, off which my heels
scaled the rust in long flakes, and thrust my head through one
of the great empty windows to take in the view.

"--Which was indeed magnificent. But my eye switched from it to
a mean little human figure, moving along the foreshore with a
gait which, even at a goodish distance, I recognised for
Farrell's. It looked like a beetle creeping, nearing, across
the flats and hummocks. But it was Farrell.

"He halted at some distance, as I had halted; arrested, as I had
been arrested, at sight of the incongruous great structure,
planted here. He drew close, cast a sort of questioning glance
seaward, very deliberately drew a pair of field-glasses from a
case slung over his shoulder, and focused them on the building,
lifting them slowly.

"I had drawn back behind my window-jamb, yet so as to watch him.
As he tilted the glasses upward, I leaned out.

"He stood for a moment, or two motionless. Then his hands sank,
with the glasses clutched in them. He walked slowly away.
When he judged himself hidden by a spit of the shore--but my
window overlooked it--he broke into a run.

"I note that he is already beginning to reduce his figure.

"I returned the call that same evening. I dropped in on