Then he departed, deaf to remonstrances. He neither knew nor cared which had been there first, but his decision, as they say in newspaper competitions, was final. The despairing James caught at his arm.

‘Look here! I say!’

‘Well, mister?’

‘How long is it going to be before I get a tent?’

The aged mariner threw a dispassionate glance over the waiting throng. ‘Might be an hour, might be an hour and a half, I can’t say.’

At that moment James espied Grace and the Sopworth girls running lightly down the sands towards the sea.

‘Damn!’ said James to himself. ‘Oh, damn!’

He plucked once more at the aged mariner.

‘Can’t I get a tent anywhere else? What about one of these huts along here? They all seem empty.’

‘The huts,’ said the ancient mariner with dignity, ‘are private.’

Having uttered this rebuke, he passed on. With a bitter feeling of having been tricked, James detached himself from the waiting groups, and strode savagely down the beach. It was the limit! It was the absolute, complete limit! He glared savagely at the trim bathing-boxes he passed. In that moment from being an Independent Liberal, he became a red-hot Socialist. Why should the rich have bathing-boxes and be able to bathe any minute they chose without waiting in a crowd? ‘This system of ours,’ said James vaguely, ‘is all wrong.’

From the sea came the coquettish screams of the splashed. Grace’s voice! And above her squeaks, the inane ‘Ha, ha, ha’, of Claud Sopworth.

‘Damn!’ said James, grinding his teeth, a thing which he had never before attempted, only read about in works of fiction.

He came to a stop, twirling his stick savagely, and turning his back firmly on the sea. Instead, he gazed with concentrated hatred upon Eagle’s Nest, Buena Vista, and Mon Desir. It was the custom of the inhabitants of Kimpton-on-Sea to label their bathing-huts with fancy names. Eagle’s Nest merely struck James as being silly, and Buena Vista was beyond his linguistic accomplishments. But his knowledge of French was sufficient to make him realize the appositeness of the third name.

And on that moment he saw that while the doors of the other bathing-huts were tightly closed, that of Mon Desir was ajar. James looked thoughtfully up and down the beach, this particular spot was mainly occupied by mothers of large families, busily engaged in superintending their offspring. It was only ten o’clock, too early as yet for the aristocracy of Kimpton-on-Sea to have come down to bathe.

‘Eating quails and mushrooms in their beds as likely as not, brought to them on trays by powdered footmen, pah! Not one of them will be down here before twelve o’clock,’ thought James.

He looked again towards the sea. With the obedience of a well-trained ‘leitmotif’, the shrill scream of Grace rose upon the air. It was followed by the ‘Ha, ha, ha’, of Claud Sopworth.