no touching up of Osborne, is there?" giggled the other, looking at the motor-car photograph.
"No, indeed. He looks as if he had just done it," said the friend.
A lumbering omnibus took him to Tormouth. At the Swan Hotel he haggled about the terms, and chose a room at ten shillings per diem instead of the plutocratic apartment first offered at twelve and six. In the register he signed "R. Glyn, London," and at once wrote to Winter. He almost laughed when he found that Jenkins's address on the label was some street in North London, where that excellent man's sister dwelt.
He found that Tormouth possessed one great merit – an abundance of sea air. It was a quiet old place, a town of another century, cut off from the rush of modern life by the frenzied opposition to railways displayed by its local magnates fifty years earlier. Rupert could not have selected a better retreat. He dined, slept, ate three hearty meals next day, and slept again with a soundness that argued him free from care.
But newspapers reached even Tormouth, and, on the second morning after his arrival, Osborne's bitter mood returned when he read an account of Rose de Bercy's funeral. The crowds anticipated by Winter were there, the reporters duly chronicled Rupert's absence, and there could be no gainsaying the eagerness of the press to drag in his name on the slightest pretext.
But the arrows of outrageous fortune seemed to be less barbed when he found himself on a lonely path that led westward along the cliffs, and his eyes dwelt on the far-flung loveliness of a sapphire sea reflecting the tint of a turquoise sky. A pleasant breeze that just sufficed to chisel the surface of the water into tiny facets flowed lazily from the south. From the beach, some twenty feet or less beneath the low cliff, came the murmur of a listless tide. On the swelling uplands of Dorset shone glorious patches of gold and green, with here and there a hamlet or many-ricked farm, while in front, a mile away, the cliff climbed with a gentle curve to a fine headland that jutted out from the shore-line like some great pier built by a genie for the caravels of giants. It was a morning to dispel shadows, and the cloud lifted from Rupert's heart under its cheery influence. He stopped to light a cigar, and from that moment Rupert's regeneration was complete.
"It is a shame to defile this wonderful atmosphere with tobacco smoke," he mused, "so I must salve my conscience by burning incense to the spirit of the place. That sort of spirit is invariably of the female gender. Where is the lady? Invisible, of course."
Without the least expectation of discovering either fay or mortal on the yellow sands that spread their broad highway between sea and cliff, Rupert stepped off the path on to the narrow strip of turf that separated it from the edge and looked down at the beach. Greatly to his surprise, a girl sat there, painting. She had rigged a big Japanese umbrella to shield herself and her easel from the sun. Its green-hued paper cover, gay with pink dragons and blue butterflies, brought a startling note of color into the placid foreground. The girl, or young woman, wore a very smart hat, but her dress was a grayish brown costume, sufficiently indeterminate in tint to conceal the stains of rough usage in climbing over rocks, or forcing a way through rank vegetation. Indeed, it was chosen, in the first instance, so that a dropped brush or a blob of paint would not show too vivid traces; and this was well, for some telepathic action caused the wearer to lift her eyes to the cliff the very instant after Rupert's figure broke the sky-line above the long grasses nodding on the verge. The result was lamentable. She squeezed half a tube of crimson lake over her skirt in a movement of surprise at the apparition.
She was annoyed, and, of course, blamed the man.
"What do you want?" she demanded. "Why creep up in that stealthy fashion?"
"I didn't," said Rupert.
"But you did." This with a pout, while she scraped the paint off her dress with a palette knife.
"I am very sorry that you should have cause to think so," he said. "Will you allow me to explain – "
As he stepped forward, lifting his hat, the girl cried a warning, but too late; a square yard of dry earth crumbled into dust beneath him, and he fell headlong. Luckily, the strata of shale and marl which formed the coast-line at that point had been scooped by the sea into a concavity, with a ledge, which Rupert reached before he had dropped half-way. Some experience of Alpine climbing had made him quick to decide how best to rectify a slip, and he endeavored now to spring rather than roll downward to the beach, since he had a fleeting vision of a row of black rocks that guarded the foot of the treacherous cliff. He just managed to clear an ugly boulder that would have taken cruel toll of bruised skin, if no worse, had he struck it, but he landed on a smooth rock coated with seaweed. Exactly what next befell neither he nor the girl ever knew. He performed some wild gyration, and was brought up forcibly by the bamboo shaft of the umbrella, to which he found himself clinging in a sitting posture. His trousers were split across both knees, his coat was ripped open under the left arm, and he felt badly bruised; nevertheless, he looked up into the girl's frightened face, and laughed, on which the fright vanished from her eyes, and she, too, laughed, with such ready merriment and display of white teeth, that Rupert laughed again. He picked himself up and stretched his arms slowly, for something had given him a tremendous thump in the ribs.
"Are you hurt?" cried the girl, anxiety again chasing the mirth from her expressive features.
"No," he said, after a deep breath had convinced him that no bones were broken. "I only wished to explain that your word 'stealthy' was undeserved."
"I withdraw it, then… I saw you were a stranger, so it is my fault that you fell. I ought to have told you about that dangerous cliff instead of pitching into you because you startled me."
"I can't agree with you there," smiled Rupert. "We were both taken by surprise, but I might have known better than to stand so near the edge. Good job I was not a mile farther west," and he nodded in the direction of the distant headland.
"Oh, please don't think of it, or I shall dream to-night of somebody falling over the Tor."
"Is that the Tor?" he asked.
"Yes; don't you know? You are visiting Tormouth, I suppose?"
"I have been here since the day before yesterday, but my local knowledge is nil."
"Well, if I were you, I should go home and change my clothes. How did your coat get torn? Are you sure you are not injured?"
He turned to survey the rock on which his feet had slipped. Between it and the umbrella the top of a buried boulder showed through the deep sand, ever white and soft at highwater mark.
"I am inclined to believe that I butted into that fellow during the hurricane," he said. Then, feeling that an excuse must be forthcoming, if he wished to hear more of this girl's voice, and look for a little while longer into her face, he threw a plaintive note into a request.
"Would you mind if I sat down for a minute or so?" he asked. "I feel a bit shaken. After the briefest sort of rest I shall be off to the Swan."
"Sit down at once," she said with ready sympathy. "Here, take this," and she made to give him the canvas chair from which she had risen at the first alarm.
He dropped to the sand with suspicious ease.
"I shall be quite comfortable here," he said. "Please go on with your painting. I always find it soothing to watch an artist at work."
"I must be going home now," she answered. "I obtain this effect only at a certain stage of tide, and early in the day. You see, the Tor changes his appearance so rapidly when the sun travels round to the south."
"Do you live at Tormouth?" he ventured to ask.
"Half a mile out."
"Will you allow me to carry something for you? I find that I have broken two ribs – of your umbrella," he added instantly, seeing that those radiant eyes of hers had turned on him with quick solicitude.
"Pity," she murmured, "bamboo is so much harder to mend than bone. No – you will not carry anything. I think, if you are staying at the Swan, you will find a path up a little hollow in the cliff about a hundred yards from here."
"Yes, and if you, too, are going – "
"In the opposite direction."
"Ah,