He ate his cake and climbed to the beach, and ran along it, watching the sandhoppers that skipped from under his boots at every step, and were lost on the instant.  The beach here was moist and firm.  He pulled off his boots and stockings, and ran on, conning his footprints and the driblets of sand split ahead from his bare toes.  By-and-by he came to the edge of the surf.  The strand here was glassy wet, and each curving wave sent a shadow flying over it, and came after the shadow, thundering and hissing, and chased it up the shore, and fell back, leaving for a second or two an edge of delicate froth which reminded the boy of his mother’s lace-work.

He began a sort of game with the waves, choosing one station after another, and challenging them to catch him there.  If the edge of froth failed to reach his toes, he won.  But once or twice the water caught him fairly, and ran rippling over his instep and about his ankles.

He was deep in this game when he heard a horn blown somewhere high on the towans behind him.

He turned.  No one was in sight.  The house lay behind the sand-banks, the first ridge hiding even its chimney-smoke.  He gazed along the beach, where the perpetual haze of spray seemed to have removed the light-house to a vast distance.  A sense of desolation came over him with a rush, and with something between a gasp and a sob he turned his back to the sea and ran, his boots dangling from his shoulders by their knotted laces.

He pounded up the first slope and looked for the cottage.  No sign of it!  An insane fancy seized him.  These silent moving sands were after him.

He was panting along in real distress when he heard the baying of dogs, and at the same instant from the top of a hummock caught sight of a figure outlined against the sky, and barely a quarter of a mile away; the figure of a girl on horseback—­a small girl on a very tall horse.

Just as Taffy recognised her, she turned her horse, walked him down into the hollow beyond, and disappeared.  Taffy ran towards the spot, gained the ridge where she had been standing, and looked down.

In a hollow about twenty feet deep and perhaps a hundred wide were gathered a dozen riders, with five or six couples of hounds and two or three dirty terriers.  Two of the men had dismounted.  One of these, stripped to his shirt and breeches, was leaning on a long-handled spade and laughing.  The other—­a fellow in a shabby scarlet coat—­held up what Taffy guessed to be a fox, though it seemed a very small one.  It was bleeding.  The hounds yapped and leapt at it, and fell back a-top of each other snarling, while the Whip grinned and kept them at bay.  A knife lay between his wide-planted feet, and a visgy[1] close behind him on a heap of disturbed sand.

The boy came on them from the eastward, and his shadow fell across the hollow.

“Hullo!” said one of the riders, looking up.  It was Squire Moyle himself.  “Here’s the new Passon’s boy!”