It's different with us Englishmen." He stumbled on for a hundred yards or more, vacuously, almost drunkenly, for the hideous agony that he was enduring half paralysed his brain, and by its very excess was bringing him some temporary relief.

He looked at the raging sea to his right, and in a vague fashion wished that it had swallowed him.

He looked at the kind earth of the ploughed field to his left, and wished vividly, for the idea was more familiar, that six feet of it lay above him.

Then he remembered that just beyond that sand-heap he had found a plover's nest with two eggs in it fifty years ago when he was a boy, and had taken one egg and left the other, or rather had restored it because the old bird screamed so pitifully about him.

In some strange manner that little, long-forgotten act of righteousness brought a glow of comfort to his tormented spirit.