Now, owing to its peculiar construction, Harmouth High Street acts as a funnel for the off-shore breezes; they rush through it as they rush through Windy Gap, that rift in the coast before which the wary fisherman slackens sail.  Just such an air was careering seawards when Mr. Pilkington was about to perform the difficult feat of folding his paper backwards.  It smote one side of the broadsheet and tore it from his grasp, making it flutter like a sail escaped from the lanyard.  The breeze dropped; it hovered; it waited like the wanton that it was; and when Mr. Pilkington’s free hand made a clutch at the flying columns, it seized that moment to lift his hat from his head and dash it to the ground.  Then the demon of the wind entered into and possessed that high thing; the hat rolled, it curvetted, it turned brim over crown, it took wings and flew, low and eager like a cormorant; finally it struck the beach, gathering a frightful impetus from the shock, and bounded seawards, the pebbles beating from it a thin drum-like note.  Never was any created thing so tortured with indecent merriment in the face of doom.  The end seemed certain, for Dicky Pilkington, though he joined in the hysterics of the crowd, had not compromised his dignity by pursuit; when, just as the hat touched the foam of perdition, Molly Trick, the fat bathing woman, interposed the bulwark of her body; she stooped; she spread her wide skirts, and the maniac leapt into them as into a haven.

The young men who watched this breezy incident over the blinds of the London and Provincial Bank were immensely diverted.  Even Rickman laughed as Dicky turned to him his cheerful face buffeted by the wind.

Mr. Pilkington had put up at the same hotel as Rickman, and they found themselves alone at the dinner-table.

“Glori-orious air this,” said Mr. Pilkington.  “I don’t know how you feel, young ’un, but there’s a voice that tells me I shall dine.”

Mr. Pilkington was not deceived by that prophetic voice.  He dined with appetite undiminished by his companion’s gloom.  From time to time he rallied him on his coyness under the fascinations of beef-steak, lager beer, apricots and Devonshire cream.

“Well, Razors,” he said at last, “and wot do you think of the Harden Library?”

Rickman was discreet.  “Oh, it isn’t bad for a private show.  Sir Frederick doesn’t seem to have been much of a collector.”

“Wasn’t he, though!  In his own line he was a pretty considerable collector, quite a what d’you call ’em—­virtuoso.”

“Not very much virtue about him, I imagine.”

“Well, whatever there may have been, in ten years that joker went through his capital as if it had been a paper hoop.  Slap through it and out at the other side, on his feet, grinning at you.”

“How did he manage it?”

“Cards—­horses—­women—­everything you can name,” said Dicky, “that’s amusing, and at the same time expensive.  They’re precious slow down here in the country; but get ’em up to town, and there’s nothing like ’em for going the pace, when they do go it.”