I put my head round the door and looked at him. "Immediately above the touts'," said I.
The breeze of the morning had died away, and though the month was the month of April, it might have been a midsummer afternoon. I started on my solitary round, well enough pleased, really, to be alone. The weather was excellent company. My clubs I carried myself.
The fourth hole lies in a little valley, under the lee of a steep, rock-studded hill, whose other side falls sheer into the tumbling waves. On an idle impulse I left my clubs at the fifth tee and scrambled on up the green slope to gaze upon and over the sea below. I have a weakness for high places on the edges of England. I cannot match the dignity of them. Where yellow sands invite, these do not even stoop to challenge. They are superb, demigods, the Royalty of the coast.
As I breasted the summit, I heard a child's voice reading aloud.
"And the people told him of all the splendid things which were in the city, and about the King, and what a pretty Princess the King's daughter was."
'Where can one get to see her?' asked the soldier.
"'She is not to be seen at all,' said they, all together 'she lives in a great copper castle, with a great many walls and towers round about it; no one but the King may go in and out there, for it has been prophesied that she shall marry a common soldier, and the King can't bear that."'
"'I should like to see her,' thought the soldier..."
"The reading came from beyond and below me. I fell on my knees, crawled forward, and peered over the top of a slab of rock. On the warm grass, twenty paces from the edge of the cliff, sat a little boy, his brown knees propping a book. By his side, facing the sea, lay a girl of nineteen or twenty years, her hands clasped behind her head. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be asleep. The reading continued.
"And all his friends knew him again, and cared very much for him indeed."