sailors, and pretty young women, mostly bareheaded and neatly dressed in black, mingled with both.  It was what a fastidious observer of life might call “low,” but Davenant’s judgments had no severity of that kind.  He looked at the merry groups, composed for the most part of chance acquaintances, here to-day and gone to-morrow, swift and light of love, with a curious craving for fellowship.  From the gatherings of friends he felt himself invariably the one shut out.

It was this sense of exclusion that finally sent him away from the cheerful quay to wander down the jetty which marks the line where the Harbor of Grace, with its intricate series of basins and docks, becomes the sea.  It was a mild night, though the waves beat noisily enough against the bastions of the pier.  At intervals he was swept by a scud of spray.  All sorts of acrid odors were in the wind—­smells of tar and salt and hemp and smoke and oil—­the perfumes of sea-hazard and romance.

Pulling his cap over his brows and the collar of his ulster about his ears, he sat down on the stone coping.  His shoulders were hunched; his hands hung between his knees.  He did not care to smoke.  For a few minutes he was sufficiently occupied in tracing the lines and the groupings of lights.  He had been in Havre more than once before, and knew the quai de Londres from the quai de New York, and both from the quai du Chili.  Across the mouth of the Seine he could distinguish the misty radiance which must be Trouville from that which must be Honfleur.  Directly under his eyes in the Avant Port the dim hulls of steamers and war-ships, fishing-boats and tugs, lay like monsters asleep.

There was no reason why all this should make him feel outside [Transcriber’s Note:  Original reads ‘outide’] the warm glow and life of things; but it did.  It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what he knew positively to be unattainable.  It stirred a new impulse to fight for what he had definitely given up.  It raised again questions he thought he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from the beginning they were vain.

Were they vain?  In taking this form the query became more insidious—­more difficult to debate and settle once for all.  To every argument there was a perpetually recurring, “Yes, but—­” with the memory of the instants when her hand rested in his longer than there was any need for, of certain looks and lights in her eyes, of certain tones and half-tones in her voice.  Other men would have made these things a beginning, whereas he had taken them as the end.  He had taken them as the end by a foregone conclusion.  They had meant so much to him that he couldn’t conceive of asking more, when perhaps they were nothing but the first fruits.