d nerves gave him the illusion of
recovered strength.

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