Being an optimist has compensations. Indeed, it would need to have, for no virtue has ever landed any one in more damnable scrapes than optimism has landed me. But before the crash comes it does help to keep one happy.
Next morning, after that nasty night, I was singing in my bath and full of wild hopes; the fact being that a new and consoling way of looking at things had suggested itself in the very act of shaving.
"They are afraid of me!" I said to myself.
After a night's sleep the adventure by the shore had grown perhaps a little blurred in some of its details. I wished I could see that curved thing rising against the night sky a trifle more distinctly in my mind's eye; so that I could take my oath in court it was a weapon. Still, I remained perfectly assured I had been attacked, and the sustaining conclusions I now drew were, firstly, that "they" (whoever they were; and I tried to keep an open mind on that point) were so afraid of me that they were ready to stick at nothing to lay me out; secondly, that they were afraid to tackle me by day but had to choose a dark night and a lonely place; and thirdly, that with such a splendid chance it must have been nerves that made them bungle it.
"People in that state of mind will do something or other to give themselves away," I thought hopefully.
In this confident state of mind I came down for breakfast. My host, I found, was staying in bed after his night's vigil, and my hostess was daintier and more inaccessible than ever. After breakfast I reflected for a little over a pipe and then I asked her for a bit of lunch to put in my pocket and told her I was going for a long walk. She got the lunch and gave it to me without wasting a superfluous word, and off I set.
It was a breezy morning with a lot of thin cloud in the sky and a ruffled sea; cool and stimulating; the very day for a walk. I followed the exact route we took the night before, trying to identify such landmarks as rises and falls in the ground and sharp curves in the shore and farms close to the coast, but I found it was practically impossible; every feature seemed so utterly altered in daylight. My object was to find the spot where I had been attacked, and at last I had to be content with knowing that it must have been one of three or four places where the feature of a low cliff immediately under the turf was to be seen.
At one such place there was a long stretch of wall following the shore line, which could have given shelter for any one to stalk me practically from the start. At another I noticed a farm close by, and from this an assailant could easily have slipped down to the beach and run back again. At a third the configuration of the rocks was such that it would have been simple for him to have waited below the bank till he heard us coming, made a noise to bring me down, and then gone up above without exposing himself against the sky. In fact one could draw no definite conclusions at all.
Besides, there was the very distasteful alternative (and the more plausible it seemed, the more distasteful it grew) that there might well have been two people in it; one—who might have followed me, the stone thrower; and the other—who might, for instance, have been patrolling the shore from the opposite direction, the attacker.
Suspicious as I had felt at the moment, I shrank from this alternative, and in justification I asked myself,