I settled that, but I still sat for a time, wanting the energy to begin.  Then I turned toward the big hotel.  Its gorgeous magnificence seemed to my inexpert judgment to indicate the very place a rich young man of good family would select.

Huge draught-proof doors were swung round for me by an ironically polite under-porter in a magnificent green uniform, who looked at my clothes as he listened to my question and then with a German accent referred me to a gorgeous head porter, who directed me to a princely young man behind a counter of brass and polish, like a bank—­like several banks.  This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my collar and tie—­and I knew that they were abominable.

“I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on Tuesday,” I said.

“Friends of yours?” he asked with a terrible fineness of irony.

I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been.  They might have lunched there, but they had had no room.  But I went out—­door opened again for me obsequiously—­in a state of social discomfiture, and did not attack any other establishment that afternoon.

My resolution had come to a sort of ebb.  More people were promenading, and their Sunday smartness abashed me.  I forgot my purpose in an acute sense of myself.  I felt that the bulge of my pocket caused by the revolver was conspicuous, and I was ashamed.  I went along the sea front away from the town, and presently lay down among pebbles and sea poppies.  This mood of reaction prevailed with me all that afternoon.  In the evening, about sundown, I went to the station and asked questions of the outporters there.  But outporters, I found, were a class of men who remembered luggage rather than people, and I had no sort of idea what luggage young Verrall and Nettie were likely to have with them.

Then I fell into conversation with a salacious wooden-legged old man with a silver ring, who swept the steps that went down to the beach from the parade.  He knew much about young couples, but only in general terms, and nothing of the particular young couple I sought.  He reminded me in the most disagreeable way of the sensuous aspects of life, and I was not sorry when presently a gunboat appeared in the offing signalling the coastguard and the camp, and cut short his observations upon holidays, beaches, and morals.

I went, and now I was past my ebb, and sat in a seat upon the parade, and watched the brightening of those rising clouds of chilly fire that made the ruddy west seem tame.  My midday lassitude was going, my blood was running warmer again.  And as the twilight and that filmy brightness replaced the dusty sunlight and robbed this unfamiliar place of all its matter-of-fact queerness, its sense of aimless materialism, romance returned to me, and passion, and my thoughts of honor and revenge.  I remember that change of mood as occurring very vividly on this occasion, but I fancy