There passed through the Season Ticket turnstile two young men. Both wore dark suits and conventional collars and ties (as if they, at any rate, had no need to don their coloured jackets and flannel trousers while they could), and the attendant at the turnstile had touched his cap as they had passed. One of them, the taller of the two, wore his straw hat halo-wise at the back of his head, filled his pipe as he walked, and looked cheerfully and unobservingly about him; the other's straw was well down, and the eyes beneath its brim sought somebody or something, and would apparently be satisfied with nothing less. The first was Percy Briggs, and everybody in Llanyglo knew Percy Briggs--Percy Briggs, who strolled casually into Hotel Cosies towards midday, nodded to the more favoured ones, said to the barmaid "So and So been in yet?" and, getting a bright "No, Mr. Briggs, not yet" for an answer, lounged out again without having had a drink--a sufficient gage of privilege and familiarity with the place. The other was John Willie Garden, who knew Llanyglo, knew which faces had been there last year and the year before, and was now looking for a face he had seen yesterday evening for one moment only and had then lost again. The Pier was an old, old story to him now. Between seasons, on winter nights, the drub-drub of a few months before seemed sometimes still faintly to echo in his ears--this when the grey skies came, and in the hotels a few rooms only were kept open for unprofitable commercial travellers, and the Promenade was empty, and the Pleasure Packet Service laid up, and a walk to the end of the Pier and back seemed a long way to feet that had covered the distance twenty times on a summer's evening, and the colourless sea seemed to give to the red and white blink of the Trwyn Light a sudden and nearer significance. He knew every hour of Llanyglo's day--the hours of departure of the pleasure-boats to Rhyl and Llandudno and round Anglesey, the bathing-hours in the morning, the high-school parade at midday, the second bathing relay in the afternoon, the tea-hour, the walk of parents and children to see the boats come in again in the early evening, and then, as the evening wore on, the successive appearances and droppings out of this kind or that, the emptying of the Pavilions, the inflow of the shop-girls and waitresses, the rush for the public-houses half an hour before the Pier lights went out, the thinning numbers who beat the Promenade, the parties of the Alsatians who sat up in one another's hotels long after every public drinking-place had been closed. He had nothing further to learn about it all, and it bored him. Only his search for that girl had brought him on the Pier to-night.