All that morning, as he supervised his boys’ lesson, his mind ran upon what she had said about Weymouth. How strange that he had himself proposed to Christie that they should go down there this very Sunday⁠ ⁠… quite independently of the Burden Hotel! Everything in his life seemed gravitating just then towards Weymouth⁠—towards that birthplace of his murdered “mythology”⁠—but too heartless was he now to care a straw!

“I won’t spoil Gerda’s happiness by breathing a word about this Sunday,” he said to himself; “and very likely, anyway, Christie will have forgotten. Olwen has cut me out. That’s the long and the short of it. Olwen has cut me out!”

As he stared at the ink-stains on the wall, he found himself selecting one particular stain to serve as a raft in the dead-sea drift of his trouble. This stain was an elongated one; and before he knew what he was doing, he had turned it into a road⁠—a road like that road in the Gainsborough picture.