After looking at this plant, however, and that plant, for about half an hour, he found himself insensibly approaching the garden gate, and his habitual impulse carried him through it and along the walk to the top of the cliff, He could not have sat down to his breakfast comfortably without his morning look at the sea; and there might be other feelings, too, a little concerned, with which we have nothing to do at this moment, as the only indications thereof, in the walk he took at present, were to be found in a slight deviation from the well-worn path which he usually followed. As soon as he had come within sight of the shore, then, he turned to the right for about two hundred yards along the top of the cliff, and paused at a spot where a projecting part of the crag formed a little nook or recess below, not big enough, indeed, to deserve the name of a bay, and never reached by the water but at times when spring tides were accompanied by high southwesterly winds.
Above that spot he paused, and suffering the telescope, his almost invariable companion, to drop by his side, gazed down upon a large mass of stones and seaweed on the shore. He was suddenly startled, however, by the sound of a footstep, and instantly the telescope went up to his eye, and was pointed towards a small vessel out at sea.
"Well, captain," cried the voice of young Hargrave, "good-morning to you. I could find no one in the house but the maid and the cook, and so, after giving each of them a kiss for good luck, I came out for a cruise; and so here you are."
"You had better mind where you cruise, though," muttered Captain Longly, in a low and angry voice, the tones of which were too indistinct for the other to hear; and seeing the old sailor still looking through his glass, the lieutenant asked, "Can you make her out?"
"The revenue cutter, I think," answered Longly; and, without more words, he turned back to the house.
Captain Long was evidently surly from some cause; and after doing all that he could during breakfast to make Hannah Longly in love with him, Arthur Hargrave announced that he was going out for a long walk up into the country on business, and would not be back till late.
Captain Long seemed not a little rejoiced to see him go, and even lent him a couple of guineas, which the other asked, with perfect confidence; but the old sailor added to his farewell a notice that he closed his doors at ten o'clock at night, and opened them again for nobody less than King George.
CHAPTER IX.
Although suspicion formed no part of the character of Charles Tyrrell, to whom we now return, and though his whole mind was of a frank, daring, and straightforward character, which admitted a few doubts with regard to the motives or purposes of others, yet he could scarcely refrain from giving credence to a suspicion which crossed his mind that Mr. Driesen's vaticination regarding the delay of his journey to Oxford must have had its rise in something which had passed between that gentleman and his father on the preceding night.
Charles Tyrrell was wrong, however, as he soon found, not doing justice to that acuteness with which Mr. Driesen was endowed in a very extraordinary degree, and by which men possessed of great experience in human character discover by slight, and, to others, almost imperceptible indications, the conduct which particular persons are likely to pursue long before that conduct is developed. This, however, Charles had soon cause to admit; for the circumstances which caused his father to recall him, and offered an excuse for detaining him during that day from Oxford, had only arisen that very morning.