In a moment a slight figure in a blue gown appeared from under the cliff and entered the sea.

Shoving his glasses into his pocket, Joses began to shuffle down the hill toward the Gap.  The kittiwakes flashed and swept and hovered in the blue above him.  The sea shone and twinkled far beneath.  A great, brown-sailed barge lolled lazily by under the cliff.

He was unaware of them, shuffling over the short, sweet-scented turf like some great human hog, snorting as he went, his eyes on that little bobbing black dot on the face of the waters beneath him.

There was no cover.  The turf lifted its calm face to the naked sky.  And he crept along, crouching in himself, as though fearing detection from on high.

The girl was in and out of the water again with astonishing speed.  By the time the tout had reached the foot of the hill she was under the cliff again and out of sight.  He peered over stealthily.  There was nothing much to see but a dark blue gown spread on a rock to dry, and behind the rock the bob of a bathing cap.

The Gap was three hundred yards away.  A sleepy coastguard had emerged from one of the cottages and was washing at a tub of rain water.

Where Joses stood the cliff was low, scarcely twenty feet above the beach, and was not entirely precipitous.

He pocketed his glasses and scrambled panting down to the beach.

Then he began to stalk the rock decorated with the bathing gown; and he did not look pretty.

His hot red face perspired, and he panted as he crawled.

It is hard to say what was in his heart, and better perhaps not to inquire.

One thing only stood out clearly in his mind.

He owed that girl behind the rock two; and Joses rarely forgot to pay his debts.

There was first the affair of the wood.  He suffered pain and inconvenience still as the result of that incident, and the doctor told him that he might expect to continue to suffer it.  And what mattered more, there was the sense of humiliation and the disfigurement.  His nose, never a thing of beauty, was now a standing offence.  The children ran from it, and Joses was genuinely fond of children.  The little daughter of Mrs. Boam, his landlady, Jenny, once his friend, had now deserted him.

And there was the matter of the young man, which he found it even harder to forgive.  That young man was Silver, and he was a Mug.  A mug was made to be drained; and Joses had dreamed that to him would fall the draining of this singularly fine specimen of his class.  His attachment to the firm of the Three J’s, based largely on fear, was not such but that he would break it at any moment could he do so with security and profit.

He had known all about Silver long before he had turned up at Putnam’s; it was part of his business to know about such young men.  Indeed, he had made an abortive, determined, and characteristically tortuous attempt to sweep the young man and his horses into Jaggers’s capacious net.