‘No,’ she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by Dudley.  A funny and a naughty reason, was it?  Not so very naughty:  but it was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.

Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical evening, as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the ladies to bed, made them share her father’s amused view of the lamb of the flock this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious instrument tucked under his chin.  He was a guest for the night.  Dressing in the early hour, Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon joined him, to hear him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine.  ’These lengths of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!’ were the satirist’s present black beast.  ’So these moneyed English shoulder to the front place; and that is the appearance they offer to their commercial God!’ He gazed along the miles of ‘English countenance,’ drearily laughing.  Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle.  Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation:  ‘Capital!’

‘Come where the shops are,’ said Nesta.

‘And how many thousand parsons have you here?’

‘Ten, I think,’ she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers:  the Rev. Septimus; Mr. Sowerby.

‘News of our friend of the whimpering flute?’

‘Here? no.  I have to understand you!’

Colney cast a weariful look backward on the ‘regiments of Anglo-Chinese’ represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said:  ’The face of a stopped watch!—­the only meaning it has is past date.’

He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby.  But it might have been an allusion to the general view of the houses.  But again, ’the meaning of it past date,’ stuck in her memory.  A certain face close on handsome, had a fatal susceptibility to caricature.

She spoke of her ‘exile’:  wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned over the loss of her Louise.  The puzzle of the reason for the long separation from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.

They turned on to the pier.

Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her visit to the place when she was a child: 

’"And then along the pier we sped,
And there we saw a Whale
He seemed to have a Normous Head,
And not a bit of Tail!"’

’Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse condition rules,’ Colney said.

’"And then we scampered on the beach,
To chase the foaming wave;
And when we ran beyond its reach
We all became more brave."’

Colney remarked:  ‘I was a poet—­for once.’

A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry of pleasure and—­a silvery ‘You dear!’ at sight of Nesta; then at sight of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most conventional.  ‘We ride to-day?’