I had thought myself fortunate in my lodgings.  They were in a most charming old-world cottage—­as I have said on the Parade—­and at high tide I could have thrown a biscuit into the sea with merely a lazy jerk.  My sitting-room put forth a semi-circular window—­like a lighthouse lantern—­upon the very pathway, and it had been soothing during the afternoon to look from out this upon the little world of sea and sky and striding cliff that was temporarily mine.  From the Parade four feet of stone wall dipped to a second narrow terrace, and this, in its turn, was but a step above a slope of shingle that ran down to the water.

Veritably had I pitched my tent on the wide littoral of rest.  So I thought with a smile, as I composed myself for slumber.

I slept, and I woke, and I lay awake for hours.  Every vext problem of my life and of the hereafter presented itself to me, and had to be argued out and puzzled over with maddening reiteration.  The reason for this was evident and flagrant.  It had woven itself into the tissue of my brief unconsciousness, and was now recognised as, ineradicably, part of myself.

The tide was incoming, that was all, and the waves currycombed the beach with a swishing monotony that would have dehumanized an ostler.

This rings like the undue inflation of a little theme.  I ask no pity for it, nor do I make apology for my weakness.  Men there may be, no doubt, to whom the unceasing recurrent thump and scream of a coasting tide on shingle speaks, even in sleep, of the bountiful rhythm of Nature.  I am not one of them—­at least, since I visited King’s Cobb.  The noise of the waters got into my brain and stayed there.  It turned everything else out—­sleep, thought, faith, hope, and charity.  From that first awakening my skull was a mere globe of stagnant fluid, for any disease germs that listed to propagate in.

Perhaps I was too near the coast-line.  The highest appreciations of Nature’s thunderous forces are conceived, I believe, in the muffled seclusion of the study.  I had heard of still-rooms.  I did not quite know what they were; but they seemed to me an indispensable part of seaside lodgings, and for the rest of that night I ardently and almost tearfully longed to be in one.

I came down in the morning jaded and utterly unrefreshed.  It was patent that I was in no state to so much as outline the preliminaries of my great undertaking.  “Use shall accustom me,” I groaned.  “I shall scarcely notice it to-night.”

And it was at this point that Miss Whiffle walked like a banshee into the disturbed chambers of my life, and completed my demoralization.

I must premise that I am an exquisitively nervous man—­one who would accept almost ridiculous impositions if the alternative were a “scene.”  Strangers, I fancy, are quick to detect the signs of this weakness in me; but none before had ever ventured to take such outrageous advantage of it as did Miss Whiffle, with the completest success.