They lay side by side on that deserted coast. The beach below them stretched out each side into infinity, they had been there an hour or so and no one had passed within those miles of sands. At first they had watched the shipping through his binoculars, but the wind had flattened them, pushing them down.

She thought how like tomb effigies they looked, and how easy it would be to bury a corpse here, deep in the sand, under the accumulating wind, forever. She remembered a red spade she had used a few miles from here, in those Ostend childhood summers. She imagined herself burying him gladly forever, but could not think how one would kill a person, her husband, here. He would, naturally, not simply die to please her. Still she imagined it, he seemed immobile now, the wind took the sound of his breath away, he might be dead. When she had thus interred him in her mind, she sighed. It would be an answer to all their problems.