The supper dance gave him the right to claim her again. In the interim he had done a lot of thinking. He had his phrases turned and clear in his mind. He knew very definitely what he wanted to say; he had rehearsed it in his thoughts endless times. And he knew the right atmosphere for the deliverance of those neatly turned sentences. He wasn't going to fling the thing at her in a crowded room with numberless people present. They would slip away together in the moonlight, and stroll along the sea wall, against which the tiny waves broke softly, running in and curling round the rocks, slapping musically against the stonework which checked their further advance. He could tell her to the accompaniment of the sea what he could not tell her in a hot and crowded place. He wanted her to himself, away from these others. It was not a difficult matter to persuade her to go with him. With the finish of supper they left the hall together, crossed the moonlit square, passed the Customs House, and so on to the sea wall, where the quiet of the night was undisturbed; the swish of lapping water and the low murmur of the sea were the only audible sounds in the surrounding stillness. He sat down beside her on a seat cut into the wall, and remained very still, holding her hand and looking away to where the ships rode at anchor far out on the silver sea. All the things which he had meant to say to her, all his carefully planned sentences, eluded him; he felt intensely, horribly nervous as he sat there in the growing silence, holding her hand and looking out across the sea. The girl sat and looked at the water also and forgot the man beside her. Her thoughts were away from her present surroundings. She was thinking of a sentence in one of Hallam's letters, while she sat silent in the moonlight and saw the surface of the sea, as he had seen it from his window while he wrote his letter to her, splashed with silver, broken up and spread over it, a running liquid fire. It was here just as he had described it--the same sea, the same moon,--with the waste of waters intervening, dividing them in everything but thought. Sinclair had made a mistake in taking her down to the sea. "Esme!" he said presently, breaking the dragging silence, and pressing her hand warmly in his strong grasp. "Esme!" She turned her face to his, wholly unaware of the emotional stress under which he laboured, but conscious of a quality in his voice which rendered it unfamiliar. She saw his face close to hers, strained and white in the moonlight, heard his breathing, hard and deep, like the breathing of a man after violent exercise, and felt a faint surprise. Dimly she began to realise that something unusual was happening; a look of apprehension grew in her eyes. He groped about after the sentences he had so carefully prepared, but his mind was a blank. He could think of nothing effective to say; and all the while her eyes, puzzled and questioning, were on his face.