The fine head, a-ripple with curls, was outlined against the sky. The face was keener than a few days back; the jolly laughing look was there no more. The blue eyes were touched to steel; and nose and jowl thrust forth with ominous grimness. It was the face of the determined fighter, hard-set and terrible.
He leaned out into the morning, whistling quietly, as fair a mark as any sharp-shooter on the knoll might wish, so Kit suddenly recalled, and plucked at him.
The other's arm was iron against him. The Parson made no move, seeming neither to feel, nor understand. A man of marble, he dwelt in the mind; brooding on that glimmer of pearls in the east.
Yet after a minute, as though the message had taken just that time to reach his remote brain, he answered the boy's thought.
"That's all right, Kit," he said, deliberate as in a dream. "The
Gentleman has changed his dispositions. He's withdrawn from the knoll.
Where the Gang are I don't know, but he has got the main of his
Grenadiers on the landside still."
Kit peeped out of the Downs-ward window.
The old picquet on the plain, the old cordon of pacing Grenadiers, the old camp-fire with the drifting smoke and arms piled beside it; and further North, from beneath a thorn, the flash of a bayonet told of an outlying sentry posted there to watch for the relieving force no doubt.
Sick at heart, the lad turned and looked out over the Parson's shoulder.
On his right front humped the knoll, an islet set in a sea of turf, now only tenanted by dark sycamores, ruffling it in the dawn-wind.
Beneath him the greensward ran away to the shingle-bank. Beyond the crest of it, the mast of the lugger pricked up black against the sparkling water.