Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/498

Rh "And out!"

He was difficult to follow in his description of the Sea Lady. She wore her wrap, it seems, and she was "like a statue"—whatever he may have meant by that. Certainly not that she was impassive. "Only," said the porter, "she was alive. One arm was bare, I know, and her hair was down, a tossing mass of gold.

"He looked, you know, like a man who's screwed himself up.

"She had one hand holding his hair—yes, holding his hair, with her fingers in among it

"And when she see my face she threw her head back laughing at me.

"As much as to say, 'got 'im!'

"Laughed at me, she did. Bubblin' over."

I stood for a moment conceiving this extraordinary picture. Then a question occurred to me.

"Did he laugh?" I asked.

"Gord bless you, sir! Laugh? No!"

The definite story ends in the warm light outside Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel. One sees that bright solitude of the Leas stretching white and blank—deserted as only a seaside front in the small hours can be deserted—and all its electric light ablaze. And then the dark line of the edge where the cliff drops down to the undercliff and sea. And beyond, moonlit, the Channel and its incessant ships. Outside the front of the hotel, which is one