The dismal little wooden shelters that punctuated the parade were deserted, the pier stretched an untenanted length of boards over the still, lead-coloured sea, and it seemed as if nature herself was waiting for some elemental catastrophe.
And though the afternoon was of such hideous and sultry heat, Mr.
Taynton, though he walked somewhat more briskly than his wont, was conscious of no genial heat that produced perspiration, and the natural reaction and cooling of the skin.

Some internal excitement and fever of the brain cut off all external things; the loneliness, the want of correspondence that fever brings between external and internal conditions, was on him.

At one moment, in spite of the heat, he shivered, at another he felt that an apoplexy must strike him.
For some half hour he walked to and fro along the sea-wall, between the blackness of the sky and the lead-coloured water, and then his thoughts turned to the downs above this stricken place, where, even in the sultriest days some breath of wind was always moving.

Just opposite him, on the other side of the road, was the street that led steeply upward to the station.

He went up it.
* * * * * It was about half-past seven o'clock that evening that the storm burst.