Our daily life at Glanymôr was placid and not unpleasant. The soft Welsh air, the perpetual sobbing of the sea beneath our windows, the peaceful atmosphere, the wholesome food all reacted on my over-strung nerves, which in time began to recover their wonted tone. I was braced by bathing in the Atlantic waters, icy-cold though they were; I appreciated my daily walks in company with Dr Wayne along the crest of the indented shore that faces the crags of Ynys Ilar. I mightily preferred the cries of the curlew and guillemot to the shouting of men and the hooting of cars in London. Altogether I was tolerably happy but for one drawback, and this was my total inability to concentrate my thinking powers on the very subject I had travelled hither to study. Try as I would, I could not marshal my reasonings and calculations to meet in one point; and so I allowed the crucial question to remain unanswered, almost unattempted, and let myself drift with the current of my own indecision. Instead of racking my brain, I preferred to lie in some sheltered hollow of the rocks above the water, watching the waves collect and disperse with half-shut eyes that idly noted the dull yellow riband of tiny shells which marked the limits of the advancing and receding tides along the line of cliffs. Dr Wayne, in such hours as he could spare from his multiplicity of newspapers, was evidently studying me and my movements with silent interest, but we rarely spoke during our long walks above the coast-line or over the brown fallows and stony paths of the wind-swept treeless countryside. Thus passed day after day of that precious interregnum, which ought to have been expended in constant deliberation and with the nicest weighing of advantages, instead of being frittered thus in yielding to an insistent temptation to somnolence and vacuity of mind. Perhaps there may have been some external unsuspected force, which was being directed against my own efforts of concentration to prevent my arriving at any conclusion. I had been the plaything of Fate for so long that possibly I may be excused for harbouring such a notion. IX