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car slowed to a walking pace behind a sports coupé which felt its way through the crowd of excited people blocking the southern end of the Marine Parade, he sprang into the road.

“I’ll pick you up later, Roy,” he cried, as he swung the door shut. “Look out for me. I’ll have a couple of passengers for you to take back.”

Roy’s suspicions vanished. He grinned happily.

“That’s the talk!” he replied heartily. “You go and hunt ’em up, and I’ll be right down this end, ready to take you back home. No waiting and no delay. Cheerio!”

He sounded his horn with a flourish as Harley moved into the crowd, waving his hand in acknowledgement. He did not see the woman who walked blindly across the track of the car until he had bumped her mildly with his off mudguard. He pulled up with a jerk.

“Sorry I scared you, lady,” he apologised, “but it’s nothing to what you did to me.”

The woman, who was unhurt, looked at him without comprehension. She was hatless and her hair was dishevelled. She was clothed in something resembling a bathrobe. Roy judged her to be crazy, but she was merely dazed by the magnitude of the disaster which had taken her husband, her child and her home.

Presently she moved away aimlessly, hopelessly lost.

****

Harley made his way to the beach, which was separated from the Marine Parade by a low concrete wall now twisted and cracked in many places.

The Marine Parade itself was littered, for almost its entire length, with masses of broken brickwork and other debris. It was as though some giant hand had swept across the land and brushed the entire row of buildings into the roadway. Telegraph poles leaned at drunken angles, or had snapped like thistle-