Her own feelings gave her no clue.  Her appetite had much improved, but, against that, she was sleeping badly—­which she partly attributed to the “noise”—­and was growing, probably on account of her idle days, increasingly restless.  She found it difficult to settle down to anything—­the hours in the hotel lounge after dinner, which used to be comfortably drowsy after the day of sea-air, were now a long stretch of boredom, from which she went up early to bed, knowing that she would not sleep.  The band played on the parade every evening, but Joanna considered that it would be unseemly for her to go out alone in Marlingate after dark.  Though she would have walked out on the Brodnyx road at midnight without putting the slightest strain on either her courage or her decorum, the well-lighted streets of a town became to her vaguely dangerous and indecorous after dusk had fallen.  “It wouldn’t be seemly,” she repeated to herself in the loneliness and dullness of the lounge, and went desperately to bed.

However, three nights before going away she could bear it no longer.  After a warm April day, a purple starry evening hung over the sea.  The water itself was a deep, glaucous gray, holding strange lights besides the golden path of the moon.  Beachy Head stood out purple against the fading amber of the west, in the east All Holland Hill was hung with a crown of stars, which seemed to be mirrored in the lights of the fisher-boats off Rock-a-Nore....  It was impossible to think of such an evening spent in the stuffy, lonely lounge, with heavy curtains shutting out the opal and the amethyst of night.

She had not had time to dress for dinner, having come home late from a charabanc drive to Pevensey, and the circumstance seemed slightly to mitigate the daring of a stroll.  In her neat tailor-made coat and skirt and black hat with the cock’s plumes she might perhaps walk to and fro just a little in front of the hotel.  She went out, and was a trifle reassured by the light which still lingered in the sky and on the sea—­it was not quite dark yet, and there was a respectable-looking lot of people about—­she recognized a lady staying in the hotel, and would have joined her, but the lady, whom she had already scared, saw her coming, and dodged off in the direction of the Marine Gardens.

The band began to play a waltz from “A Persian Princess.”  Joanna felt once more in her blood the strange stir of the music she could not understand.  It would be nice to dance ... queer that she had so seldom danced as a girl.  She stood for a moment irresolute, then walked towards the bandstand, and sat down on one of the corporation benches, outside the crowd that had grouped round the musicians.  It was very much the same sort of crowd as in the morning, but it was less covert in its ways—­hands were linked, even here and there waists entwined....  Such details began to stand out of the dim, purplescent mass of the twilight people ... night was the time for love.  They had come out into the darkness to make love to each other—­their voices sounded different from in the day, more dragging, more tender....