As he looked out of the window at the dull, bleak fen country he wondered how he could ever have thought it beautiful. Mile after mile of bare, grey-green fields, ditches of tangled reeds, forlorn villages, trees that stood solitary in the midst of great plains. He saw every now and then the long, flat road along which he had cycled many times to Pangbourne. And in a little while Pangbourne itself came into view, with its huge dominating cathedral round which he had been wont formerly to conduct little enthusiastic parties of Millsteadians; Pangbourne had seemed to him so pretty and sunlit in those days, but now all was dull and dreary, and the mist was creeping up in swathes from the fenlands. Pangbourne station... Again he wished that he had not burnt Clare's letter. At noon he was at Seacliffe, booking accommodation at the Beach Hotel. II "Heaven knows what we are going to do with ourselves here," he remarked to Helen during lunch. "You've got to rest," replied Helen. He went on to a melancholy mastication of bread. "So far as I can see, we're the only visitors in the entire hotel." "Well, Kenneth, March is hardly the season, is it?" "Then why did we come here? I'd much rather have gone to town, where there's always something happening. But a seaside-place in winter!--is there anything in the world more depressing?" "There's nobody in the world more depressing than you are yourself," she answered tartly. "It isn't my fault we've come here in March. It isn't my fault we've come here at all. And what good would London have done for you? It's rest you want, and you'll get it here." "Heavens, yes--I'll get it all right." After a silence he smiled and said: "I'm sorry, Helen, for being such a wet blanket. And you're quite right, it isn't your fault--not any of it. What can we do this afternoon?" "We can have a walk along the cliffs," she answered. He nodded and took up a week-old copy of the _Seacliffe Gazette_. "That's what we'll do," he said, beginning to read. So that afternoon they had a walk along the cliffs.