They were forced to get up and shelter from blinding sand and pebbles behind the trees and shrubs in the gardens, whither the storm pursued them, piercing through every chink. Ivor's hat went, and he had to plunge some yards after it, while Agatha, half blinded by a branch dashed in her face, stood waiting, cowering from the wind behind shrubs, through the stems of which she could see the broad band of sea, the western half still glowing deeply like a peacock's throat in vivid sunlight, and the eastern half meeting it in accurate sharp division, as darkly and deeply indigo, the shallow waters shading to duck's-egg. Calm and storm, brightness and darkness, were in close contention, like the spirits in Ivor's soul--the dark and the bright, the pure love and the impure. Yet the sunlight lay deep and warm on the western waves, and the western sky was clear and cloudless above the shadowed bluffs. "Only the sea," he repeated sullenly, striding back to her, holding on his hat, and bracing himself against the fierce blast; "and you'll all be jolly well rid of me." "Why will you talk like an idiot?" she cried through the loud wind. "Be a man, Ivor, for once. Your own folly brought you to this, you know perfectly well. Try to use a little sense, a little manliness. Pick yourself out of the mud and make a better thing of life than you have ever done yet. Give up this miserable gambling, for your own sake, if not for mine. Square the man yourself. He can get nothing by breaking you. Who can get blood from a stone? What if you have to leave the Service? Use those muscles of yours to some purpose. Use your brains. You are not the idiot or the child you make yourself out. Think of those who depend upon you, and don't talk of being dependent on women. Don't for a moment suppose that I, or any woman of spirit, would dream of marrying a man who can't stand on his own foundation." They were walking against the wind, fighting their way through the deserted gardens to shelter behind the bandstand. The storm was so wild that things displayed outside shops parallel to the gardens were swept away before there was time to take them in; china hung on the walls rattled, clashed, and even cracked; newspapers, cards, handkerchiefs and scarves, flew hither and thither across street and gardens; the sunshine left the mountains, and the sky darkened. "I was an ass to think you would," he replied grimly, maddened by her scorn, and in spite of the beating wind on it his face was quite white; for he knew that of the spirits casting dice for his soul the black one had won. "But," he added, stopping to catch the scarf that flew from Agatha's hand as she tried to wind it round her neck--"but---- Hullo, here's de Konski!"