A few days more, and the different friends and schoolmates had collected there. It was indeed as if they had premeditated the gathering. Some went grandly _viâ_ Folkestone, some more economically by the boat from London: that little muff, Stiggings, who was fond of writing to Miss Rose, made the trip in a sailing vessel, invited to it by the captain; he was awfully sick all the way, and landed more dead than alive. The Galls and Sir Simon's party were at the Hotel du Nord; the Talbots had small lodgings in the Rue Neuve Chaussée; the Browns took a furnished house in the open country, beyond the Rue Royale; and Lady Sophia Leek, who had no acquaintance with the rest, and made none with them, was staying at the Hotel des Bains. And the time went on. But that Sir Simon Orville was the most unsuspicious of men, he had undoubtedly not failed to detect that some ill-feeling was rife between his friend Gall's eldest son, and Bertie Loftus. For three whole days after William Gall's arrival, they did not exchange a word with each other; on the fourth, a quarrel, not loud, but bitter, took place on the sands; and those low, concentrated, bitter quarrels are worse than loud ones. People, scattered in groups at only a few yards' distance, did not hear it; but they might have seen the white faces raised on each other with an angry glare, had they been less occupied with themselves, with their gossip, with the picking up of shells. Bertie Loftus was cherishing the remembrance of his insult, and paying it off fourfold in superciliousness now.