Baltazar could learn nothing definitely of what he did when he disappeared but the impression gradually emphasized itself that he spent these lonely hours in immense, solitary walks along the edge of the sea. He returned sometimes like a man absolutely exhausted and on these occasions his friend could not help observing that his shoes were full of sand and his face scorched.
One especially hot afternoon, when Stork had returned from Mundham by the midday train in the hope of finding Adrian ready to stroll with him under the trees in the park, there occurred quite a bitter and violent scene between them when the latter insisted, as soon as their meal was over, on setting off alone.
“Go to the devil!” Adrian finally flung back at his entertainer when—his accustomed urbanity quite broken down—the aggrieved Baltazar gave vent to the suppressed irritation of many days. “Go to the devil!” the unconscionable man repeated, putting down his hat over his head and striding across the green.
Once clear of the little town, he let his speed subside into a more ordinary pace and, crossing the bridge over the Loon, made his way to the sea shore. The blazing sunshine, pouring down from a sky that contained no trace of a cloud, seemed to have secured the power that day of reducing even the ocean itself to a kind of magnetised stupor. The waters rolled in, over the sparkling sands, with a long, somnolent, oily ripple that spent itself and drew back without so much as a flicker or flake of foam. The sea-gulls floated languidly on the unruffled tide, or quarrelled with little, short, petulant screams over the banks of bleached pungent-smelling seaweed where swarms of scavenging flies shared with them their noonday fretfulness.
On the wide expanse of the sea itself there lay a kind of glittering haze, thin and metallic, as if hammered out of some marine substance less resistant but not less dazzling than copper or gold. This was in the mid-distance, so to speak, of the great plain of water. In the remote distance the almost savage glitter diminished and a dull livid glare took its place, streaked in certain parts of the horizon by heavy bars of silvery mist where the sea touched the sky. The broad reaches of hard sand smouldered and flickered under the sun’s blaze and little vibrating heat waves danced like shapeless demons over the summit of the higher dunes.
Turning his face northward, Sorio began walking slowly now and with occasional glances at the dunes, along the level sand by the sea’s edge. He reached in this way a spot nearly two miles from Rodmoor where for leagues and leagues in either direction no sign of human life was visible.
He was alone with the sun and the sea, the sun that was dominating the water and the water that was dominating the land.
He stood still and waited, his heart beating, his pulses feverish, his deep-sunken eyes full of a passionate, expectant light. He had not long to wait. Stepping down slowly from the grass-covered dunes, past a deserted fisherman’s hut which had become their familiar rendezvous, came the desired figure. She walked deliberately, slowly, with a movement that, as Sorio hastened to meet her, had something almost defiant in its dramatic reserve.
They greeted one another with a certain awkwardness. Neither held out a hand—neither smiled. It might have been a meeting of two conspirators fearful of betrayal. It was only after they had walked in silence, side by side and still northwards for several minutes, that Sorio began speaking, but his words broke from him then with a tempestuous vehemence.
“None of these people here know me,” he cried, “not one of them. They take me for a dawdler, an idler, an idiotic fool. Well! That’s nothing. Nance doesn’t know me. She doesn’t care to know me. She—she loves! As if love were what I wanted—as if love were enough!”