sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green
meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody
was watching her.

Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a
seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and
like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy marriage with the
landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees,
and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious
attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened
middle-classes, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire
to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last
depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively
nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March
mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and
herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition,
an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly
unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and
chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and
weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in a corner. The
images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul, desolated her.

Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red barges
beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay, equinoctial
spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean covered with foam and
the sea-wall felt the light lash of spray, thunderstorms in autumn
gathering over the yellow melancholy of deathlike sunsets, wild birds
crying across miles of uncovered mud at early morning and duck-hunters
crouching in punts behind a waving screen of delicate grasses to wing them,
and the mysterious shapes of steamers and warships in the offing beyond the