His walk extended from the hotel door to a seat on the seafront opposite.  He repeated it the next morning with less difficulty, and even succeeded in reaching a further seat beyond the range of the hotel windows.  There he sat looking at the sea, and watching without interest the loiterers on the esplanade.  At last, by sheer repetition, three figures forced themselves on his attention; two ladies, one young, the other middle-aged, and a clergyman, who walked incessantly up and down.  They were talking as they passed him; he caught the man’s steep-pitched organ monotone, “Yes, I shall certainly go up to the house and see her,” and the girl’s voice that answered in a hard bright trill, “You won’t see her.  She hasn’t seen any body but Kitty Palliser.”

The blood boiled in his brain.  She?  She?  Was it possible that they were talking about her?  He sat there debating this question for ten minutes, when he was aware that he himself had become an object of intense interest to the three.  The two ladies were, in fact, staring rather hard.  The stare of the younger was so wide that it merely included him as an unregarded detail in the panorama of sea and sky; but the stare of the elder, a stout lady in a florid gown, was concentrated, almost passionate; it came straight at him through a double eye-glass elevated on a tortoiseshell stem.  The clergyman endeavoured to suggest by his attitude that he took no part in the staring or the talk; he smiled out to sea with an air of beatific union with Nature.

Harmouth beach is a safe place for scandal; for even a steep-pitched organ monotone with a brilliant feminine flourish on the top of it are lost in the accompaniment of the sea.  So happily for him no word of the dialogue reached Rickman.  All the same, to have a pair of blank blue eyes, and a tortoiseshell binocular levelled at him in that fashion is a little disturbing to a young man just recovering from a nervous fever; and Rickman got up and dragged himself to the other end of the esplanade out of the reach of the enemy’s fire.  Therefore he did not see that Miss Palliser, who had been watching the scene from a balcony on the front, had come down and joined the group; neither did he hear her cheerful replies to a volley of inquiries.

“Yes; I’ve seen her.  Nice day isn’t it?  What?  No, I wouldn’t if I were you.  I say, what a swagger eye-glass!  Jolly, those long stems, aren’t they?  You can stare for ever without pinching your nose or gouging your next door neighbour’s eye out with your elbow—­Oh yes, rather; he’s a friend of Horace Jewdwine’s.  Do observe Tubs bathing; his figure is not adapted—­Did you say a gentleman?  Yes, no, yes; ask somebody else.  It entirely depends on the point of view.  He’s an awfully good sort. Really, Tubs ought to be made to bathe before breakfast, when there’s nobody about.  Yes, of course she did.  She gave him the work to please Mr. Jewdwine, I suppose.  He’s been ill, poor little beggar; I must go and speak to him.”