I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should run through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these emotions.  I believed, and I think I was right in believing, that the love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a system in each other’s arms and mocked the world without.  You loved against the world, and these two loved at me.  They had their business with one another, under the threat of a watchful fierceness.  A sword, a sharp sword, the keenest edge in life, lay among their roses.

Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at any rate, it was altogether true.  I was never for dalliance, I was never a jesting lover.  I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently.  Perhaps I had written irrelevant love-letters for that very reason; because with this stark theme I could not play. . .

The thought of Nettie’s shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon to her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely physical being.  I came down among the pale sand-heaps slowly toward that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a sword of evil, drawn.

Section 6

I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.

Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought answered to my rap?  But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was—­perhaps until morning—­watching?  And
meanwhile------

All the nearer bungalows were very still now.  If I walked softly to them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard, I might get a clue to guide me.  Should I advance circuitously, creeping upon them, or should I walk straight to the door?  It was bright enough for her to recognize me clearly at a distance of many paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other people by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with these others close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize my hands.  Besides, what names might they bear here?

“Boom!” the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.

I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld a great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the dappled silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured out into the night.  As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns, firing seaward, and answering this, red flashes and a streaming smoke in the line between sea and sky.  So I remembered it, and I remember myself staring at it—­in a state of stupid arrest.  It was an irrelevance.  What had these things to do with me?

With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of the third and fourth guns reached me.