gap.

Joses closed his glasses. His face became a dirty red. It was as though
the mud in him had been stirred by an obscene hand.

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