“You’ll knock something over if you’re not careful,” protested his friend, shrugging his shoulders. “You’re the most troublesome fellow. You accept a person’s offer and make no end of a fuss over it, and then a couple of weeks later you roar like a bull and send us all to the devil. What’s the matter with us? What’s the matter with the place? Why can’t you and your precious Nance behave like ordinary people and make love to one another and be happy? She’s got all her time to herself and you’ve got all your time to yourself. Why can’t you enjoy yourselves and collect seaweed or starfish or something?”
Adrian paused in his savage prowl for the second time.
“It’s your confounded sea that’s at the bottom of it,” he shouted. “It gets on her nerves and it gets on mine. Little Linda was perfectly right to be scared of it.”
“I fancied,” drawled the other, selecting a cigarette from an enamelled box and turning up the lamp, “you found little Linda’s fears rather engaging than otherwise.”
“It works upon us,” Sorio went on, heedless of the interruption, “it works upon us in some damnable kind of way! Nance says she hears it in her sleep. I’m sure I do. I hear it without a moment’s cessation. Listen to the thing now—shish, shish, shish, shish! Why can’t it make some other noise? Why can’t it stop altogether? It makes me long for the whole damned farce to end. It annoys me, Tassar, it annoys me!”
“Sorry you find the elements so trying, Adriano,” replied the other languidly, “but I really don’t know what I can do to help you—I can only advise you to keep out of Philippa’s way. She’s an element more troublesome than any of them.”
“Tassar!” shouted the enraged man in a burst of fury, “if you don’t stop dragging Philippa in, I’ll murder you! What’s Philippa to me? I hate her—do you hear? I hate the very sound of her name!”
“Her name?” murmured Stork, meditatively, “her name? Oh, I think you’re quite wrong to hate that. Her name suggests all sorts of interesting things. Her name has quite a historic sound. It’s mediæval in colour and Greek in form. It makes me think of Euripides.”
“This whole damned Rodmoor of yours,” moaned Adrian, “gets too much for me. Where on earth else, could a man find it so hard to collect his thoughts and look at things as they are? There’s something here which works upon the mind, Tassar, something which works upon the mind.”