Beneath her a valley stretched away to the sea. There the cliff rose steeply to a lighthouse, standing on a bare summit; dipped, and rose again. In the hollow between the two hills a white coastguard station sentinelled the Gap, across which the line of the sea stretched like a silver wire.
Nobody was yet astir save a ploughman driving a team of slow-moving oxen to the fields. To Boy the beauty of the early morning lay in the fact that she had the hills and heavens and seas to herself, and could enjoy them in her own way without thought of interference from a world too frivolous, too feverish, and above all too loud, to understand.
As she rode along, her young face was uplifted to catch the rivulets of song that came pouring down on her from the blue.
She dropped down the hill, disturbing the rabbits busy in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more.
Happily Billy Bluff, who was always too much absorbed in the object immediately beneath his nose to take long views, did not see him. And the girl was glad. Sport, in so far as it meant killing the creatures of the wilderness for pleasure, made no appeal to her. She had no desire whatever to see a fight between the badger and Billy Bluff. The badger had in her judgment many qualities. She respected his desire for freedom and determination to go his own way. Also if the pair fought, the girl shrewdly suspected that Billy Bluff, big though he was, and bold as a lion, might be worsted. For Billy, after all, was decadent according to the standards of the wilderness.
He lived on a chain, protected by the police, and fed by hand. Every man was not his enemy, and he had not to hunt for each meal or go without. Billy Bluff, however fine a fellow he might be in his own eyes, was a poor creature in that of Warrior Badger. Civilization, if it had given him much of which the badger recked nothing, had also taken her toll of him.
Thinking vaguely thus, the girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of sheep across the Gap.
At the mouth of the Gap was a familiar post.
She slipped Ragamuffin's rein over it, and ran down the steep, uneven way through the chalk cliff, her bob-tail baying at her side.
Right athwart the Gap, peering into it, shining-eyed and splendid, lay the sea, calling her.