The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and clung to the nap of his clothing.  The radiance that marked Trouville and Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction.  Along the quay the cafes began to diminish the number of their lights.  The cheerful groups broke up, strolling home to the mansard or to the fo’castle, with bursts of drunken or drowsy song.  Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled, bowed.  He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind.  He was content to sit still and suffer.  In its own way suffering was a relief.  It was the first time he had given it a chance since he had brought himself to facing squarely the fact of his useless, pointless love.  He had always dodged it by finding something to be done, or choked it down by sheer force of will.  Now he let it rush in on him, all through him, all over him, flooding his mind and spirit, making his heart swell and his blood surge and his nerves ache and his limbs throb and quiver.  If he could have formed a thought it would have been that of the Hebrew Psalmist when he felt himself poured out like water.  He had neither shame for his manhood nor alarm for his pride till he heard himself panting, panting raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of victory.  That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along, that there was one clear duty to be done.  If he loved Olivia Guion with a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could lose courageously.  This was no new discovery.  It was only a fact which loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of.  But he came back to it with conviction.  It was conviction that gave him confidence, that calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up, shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple’s words came back to him, as they did from time to time:  “Some call it God.”

“I wonder if it is—­God,” he questioned.

* * * * *

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind.  It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer.  Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase.  His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger.  In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once—­and not so many years ago—­been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged