But as he lifted his fingers to brush away a fly from his face, Miss Round, Mr. Urquhart, Jason, Monk⁠—all receded and faded before him, till they became small, insignificant, wavering shadows! The smell of the dead fish, as he caught it from his raised hand, touched that spacious kitchen and turned it into thin air. In its place there appeared the hot, powdery sands by the King’s statue at Weymouth, the tethered donkeys, the goat-carriages, the peaked bathing-machines. In its place appeared the grass-green seaweed clinging to the black posts of half-obliterated breakwaters. In its place appeared the bow-window of the drawing-room in Brunswick Terrace, where, in those early mornings, as he watched his grandmother’s maid shake the duster over the sill, there always hung a peculiar odour of sun-dried woodwork, mingled with the salt of the open sea!