What to do next? If he were fortunate in catching an express, he could be in London in time to dine. As he stepped out, he saw the Seafold local waiting. What good would it do him to go to Seafold? Yet to quit now would be humiliatingly unadventurous. He was moving slowly towards the stair, when he was arrested by a voice.
“If you wouldn't mind? It was stupid of me to drop it.”
He turned sharply. She was leaning out of a carriage window which he was in the act of passing.
Without giving him time to question, she explained: “My ticket—it slipped from my hand. There it is behind you.”
The moment he had stooped and returned it, she withdrew herself. It had happened so quickly that he had no chance to guess at the features behind the heavy veil. With a promptitude of decision which almost deceived himself, as though he had never harbored any other intention, he opened the door and clambered into the carriage next to hers.
“That's that,” he thought, smiling tolerantly at his relieved sense of satisfaction. And then, “It was no accident. She saw that I was giving up the chase. She did it to keep me going. What's her game?”
Whatever her game was, he was well on the road to enlightenment. The engine was puffing through a valley, across salt-marshes intersected by dykes and sluggish streams, where derelict boats lay sunken in the mud, rotting among the wild-flowers. Grazing sheep made the quiet plaintive with their cries. Gulls, disturbed by the train's impetuous onrush, rose and drifted lazily into the peace that slumbered further inland. Of a sudden, with a gesture of exaltation, the gleaming chalk-cliffs of the coast leaped into sight and beyond them the dull flash of the Channel.
He was clamorous with excitement. Curiosity beat masterfully on the door of the future. He had to find out. Why had he been brought here? What had Santa to do with it? Who was the woman in the next compartment?
They had halted several times. Each time he had watched carefully to see whether she was eluding him. Again their speed was slackening. They were entering a little, sandy town, dotted with red-brick villas, bleached by the wind and sun. He caught glimpses between the houses of a battered esplanade, of concrete breakwaters partly destroyed, of a pebbly beach alternately sucked down and quarrelsomely hurled back by the waves. Over all hung the haunting fragrance of salt, and gorse, and wild thyme.
They had come to a standstill. Passengers were climbing out and greeting friends. A porter flung wide the door of his carriage, shouting, “Seafold! Seafold!”