‘It sounds as if they were barmy.’

‘It does rather.’

He was thinking that strangers ought to know better than to mix and meddle with the tides. They must have been strangers, because anyone who lived here would know that this was a dangerous strip of coast.

If it had been later in the year, Candida would hardly have got very far on her walk without somebody warning her, but on a chilly April evening it wasn’t likely that there would be anyone down on the beaches after tea. Candida’s old ladies were definitely a menace. He said so.

‘And I hope your friend will put it across them for misleading you. It might have been serious.’

‘Do you suppose they’ll say anything? I don’t.’

‘They’ll be bound to. Mrs. – what’s her name – Carson will be arriving. If you signed your name, she’ll know you got to the hotel, and she’ll be wondering where you are. She’ll be in a state, and your old ladies will be bound to say they spoke to you. Somebody probably saw them doing it. And if they say you were going for a walk along the beach, there’s bound to be a search-party out looking for you before long. Quite a bright thought. We’re all right here, but it will be cold before morning.’

There was no search-party, because Mrs. Carson, having started the day at 6 a.m. and crowded it with a great deal of fatiguing and mostly unnecessary exertion, was overtaken by a rather alarming fainting fit at the moment when she ought to have been catching her train to Eastcliff. She was carried into the Station Hotel and a doctor sent for. Monica, a good deal frightened, rang up Sea View to say that her mother was ill, and that she would ring up again in the morning. The line was not at all clear. Candida’s name reached her vaguely. She said, ‘Oh, I hope we’ll get down in the morning, but if we can’t, she will just have to go home.’ After which she rang off.