XIV
　　After dinner he strolled out of the hotel and down the road to the ferry. It was a clear night, but cold, with a sharp foretaste of winter. Summer was over.
　　MacWhirter crossed in the ferry to the Saltcreek side. It was the second time that he was revisiting Stark¹ Head. The place had a fascination² for him. He walked slowly up the hill, passing the Balmoral Court Hotel and then a big house set on the point of a cliff. Gull's Point - he read the name on the painted door. Of course, that was where the old lady had been murdered. There had been a lot of talk in the hotel about it; his chambermaid had insisted on telling him all about it, and the newspapers had given it a prominence³ which had annoyed MacWhirter, who preferred to read world-wide affairs and who was not interested in crime.
　　He went on downhill again to skirt a small beach and some old-fashioned fishing cottages that had been modernised. Then up again till the road ended and petered out into the track that led on up Stark Head.
　　It was grim and forbidding on Stark Head. MacWhirter stood on the cliff edge looking down to the sea. So he had stood on that other night. He tried to recapture some of the feeling he had had then - the desperation, anger, weariness - the longing⁴ to be out of it all. But there was nothing to recapture. All that had gone. There was, instead, a cold anger. Caught on that tree, rescued by coast-guards, fussed over like a naughty child in hospital, a series of indignities⁵ and affronts⁶. Why couldn't he have been let alone? He would rather, a thousand times rather, be out of it all. He still felt that. The only thing he had lost was the necessary impetus⁷.
　　How it had hurt him then to think of Mona! He could think of her quite calmly now. She had always been rather a fool. Easily taken in by anyone who flattered her or played up to her idea of herself. Very pretty. Yes, very pretty - but no mind; not the kind of woman he had once dreamed about.

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