He
returned to the hotel, and to his books.
But the attentions of Josephine and Veronique had become too pressing;
so he retired from the reading-room, and took refuge in his own room
up-stairs. It fronted the sea. He could hear the long, monotonous,
continuous wash of the waves: from time to time the windows rattled with
the wind.
He took from his portmanteau another volume from that he had been
reading, and sat down by the window. But he had only read a line or two
when he turned and looked absently out on the sea. Was he trying to
recall, amidst all that confused and murmuring noise, some other sound
that seemed to haunt him?
"Who is your lady of love, oh ye that pass
Singing?"
Was he trying to recall that pathetic thrill in his friend Evelyn's
voice which he knew was but the echo of another voice? He had never
heard Natalie Lind read: but he knew that that was how she had read,
when Evelyn's sensitive nature had heard and been permeated by the
strange tremor. And now, as he opened the book again, whose voice was it
he seemed to hear, in the silence of the small room, amidst the low and
constant murmur of the waves?
"--And ye shall die before your thrones be won.
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