"I was in London--didn't you hear?" He was startled into naturalness, the actor's naive astonishment when he finds his movements are unknown to anyone. "We had a season at the Boudoir, and opened with _The Cast of the Die_. It was a frost; and then we put on a piece of Sargent's. That might have been worked into a success if there had been money enough left to run it at a loss for a few weeks, but there wasn't. The mistake was not to have opened with it, instead. And the capital was too small altogether for a London show; the exes were awful! It would have been better to have been satisfied with management in the provinces if one had known how things were going to turn out. Now it's the provinces under somebody else's management. I suppose you think I have been rightly served?" "I don't see that you're any worse off than you used to be." "Don't you? You've no interest to see. I'm a lot worse off, for I've a wife and child to keep." "A child! You've a child?" she said. "A boy. I don't grumble about that, though; I'm fond of the kid, although I dare say you think I can't be very fond of anyone. But---- Oh, I don't know why I tell you about it--what do you care!" They were silent again. The sun, a disc in grey heavens, smeared the vapour with a shaft of pale rose, and on the water this was glorified and enriched, so that the stain on the horizon had turned a deep red. Nearer land, the sea, voluptuously still, and by comparison colourless, had yet some of the translucence of an opal, a thousand elusive subtleties of tint which gleamed between the streaks of darkness thrown upon its surface from the sky. A thin edge of foam unwound itself dreamily along the shore. A rowing-boat passed blackly across the crimsoned distance, gliding into the obscurity where sky and sea were one. To their right the shadowy form of a fishing-lugger loomed indistinctly through the mist. The languor of the scene had, in contemplation, something emotional in it, a quality that acted on the senses like music from a violin. She was stirred with a mournful pleasure that he was here--a pleasure of which the melancholy was a part. The delight of union stole through her, more exquisite for incompletion. "It's nothing to you whether I do badly or well," he said gloomily. And the dissonance of the complaint jarred her back to common-sense. "Yet it isn't long ago that we--good Lord! how women can forget; now it's nothing to you!"