Standing under the lee of the lighthouse, seeing while himself unseen, the tout kept his eyes to his glasses.
Little escaped him. He saw the badger moving on the hillside, and watched the girl on her pony come over the crest from Putnam's, a slight figure black against the sky. He followed her as she dropped down the hill and scampered along the valley, marked her hang her pony's rein over the post, and disappear down the 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.