“Ashamed?  My dear Heard, this will never do.  You must take a blue pill when we get home.”

“Can it be the south wind?”

“Everybody blames the poor sirocco.  I imagine you have long been maturing for this change, unbeknown to yourself.  And what does it mean?  Only that you are growing up.  Nobody need be ashamed of growing up. . . .  Here we are, at last!  We will land at the little beach yonder, near the end of that gulley.  You can go ashore and have a look at the old thermal establishment.  It used to be a gay place with a theatre and ballrooms and banqueting rooms.  Nobody dare enter it nowadays.  Haunted!  Perhaps you will see the ghost.  As for me, I mean to take a swim.  I always feel as if I needed a bath after talking about religion.  You don’t mind my saying so, do you?”

Mr. Heard, climbing upwards from the beach, felt as though he did not mind what anyone said about anything.

With the Devil’s Rock the most imposing tract of Nepenthean cliff—­scenery came to an abrupt end.  That mighty escarpment was its furthest outpost.  Thereafter the land fell seawards no longer precipitously, but in wavy earthen slopes intersected by ravines which the downward-rushing torrents of winter had washed out of the loose soil.  It was at the termination of one of these dry stream-beds that Mr. Heard set foot on shore.  Panting under the relentless heat he wound his way along a path once carefully tended and engineered, but now crumbling to decay.

Before him, on a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin.  It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate.  The plaster, gnawed away by winds laden with searching sea-moisture, had fallen to earth, exposing the underlying masonry of cheap construction whose rusty colour was the same as that of the ground from which it had arisen, and into which it now seemed ready and eager to descend.  Everything useful or portable, everything that spoke of man’s occupation, everything that suggested life and comfort—­the porcelain tiles, woodwork, window-panes, roofings, mosaic or marble floors, leaden pipes—­all this had been carried away long ago.  It stood there stark, dismantled, de-humanized, in the midday heat.  Here was nothing to charm the eye or conjure up visions of past glory; nothing elegant or romantic; nothing savouring of grim warlike purposes.  It was a modern ruin; a pile of rubbish; a shameless, frivolous skeleton.  Those hastily built walls and staring windows wore an air of faded futility, almost of indecency—­as though the mouldering bones of some long-forgotten lady of pleasure had crept out of their tomb to give themselves an airing in the sunshine.

Mr. Heard, after glancing at what remained of a pretentious facade, stepped within.