In Sandmouth that Friday morning the June sun blazed in a manner almost justifying the railway posters, and Station Avenue, sloping down to the Pierhead, was brilliant with the litter of cafe advertisements and stalls piled with colored buckets and gift pottery. Trams heaved over loops, while down every side street boarding-house maids breathed in the far-famed Sandmouth ozone through the dust and smells of their basement areas. David walked briskly along pavements jammed with children sucking sticks of “rock” and grown-ups dawdling with precautionary mackintoshes; then he turned the corner by the Pierhead and threaded his way along the Promenade. Here the main army of holiday-makers paraded, beach photographers touted for custom, and the wire cages attached to lampposts filled up with banana skins and chocolate wrappings as fast as Corporation scavengers could empty them. Sandmouth on a summer day was not a wholly beautiful sight, but it was always human enough to be abundantly interesting, and when the weather was good David liked to walk by the edge of the waves, noticing the faces of deck-chair loungers and stumbling over sand holes dug by frantic children.

That morning the sea was warm and calm, but the sky had a watery brightness foretelling clouds which, soon after midday, threw down spots of rain. It was during the afternoon that he made his visits; they were usually finished by five, so that he could comfortably catch the five-thirty. But the call at Mrs. Drawbell’s lengthened because a niece staying with her had taken a chill, and the call at Major Sanderson’s lengthened because the Major insisted on describing a new kind of indigestion he had acquired — to which David listened with sympathy combined with growing apprehension about the time. In the end he reconciled himself to losing the train, though actually, had he hurried, he could have caught it. He was like that — he would rather decide to miss something than have the uncertainty of chasing after it. There was no other train till the nine-seven, so he had three hours to spare. He strolled down Station Avenue to the Promenade where grey skies were breaking into one of those spectacular sea-horizon sunsets which can only be likened to picture-postcard views of themselves which would never attract the discriminating purchaser. The air, however, was cool and full of fragrances lifted by the rain, and now that the evening promised to be fine the crowds were beginning to emerge from hotels and boarding houses. David reached the Pierhead and, on sudden impulse, paid his twopence and clicked on to the wooden planks. There was something in the sound of walking on them, and in the splash of waves below, that gave him memories too far and strange to be analyzed; he had not been on Sandmouth Pier for years. It was a quarter of a mile long, terminating in a pavilion in which summer concert parties gave twice-nightly performances. One of these was imminent as he neared the festoons of colored electric globes that marked the pavilion entrance, and for a moment he watched the audience trickling in twos and threes past the pay booth. He noticed that the concert party advertised themselves as “The Cheerybles”; presently, approaching a placard more closely than before, his eye caught a programme announcement. One of its items engaged something in his mind that made him pause. “Leni Arkadrevna,” he read, “Whirlwind Danseuse from St. Petersburg.” Then he remembered, and on a second sudden impulse that evening he turned to the pay booth and bought a shilling deck-chair seat facing the open-air stage. The show was just beginning.