When in the morning he was duly shaved, dressed and brushed, he critically surveyed himself in the glass, and seemed quite dissatisfied. He moved from the glass, spread a newspaper on the table, and put into it the contents of his capacious pockets. A second examination before the glass seemed more satisfactory in result, thus indicating that to the eye of Mr. Putchett his well-stuffed pockets had been unsightly in effect.
The paper and its contents he gave the landlord to deposit in the hotel safe; then he ate a hurried, scanty breakfast, and again sought the bench on the beach.
No one was in sight, for it was scarcely breakfast-time at the boarding-houses; so he looked for little Alice's well, and mourned to find that the tide had not even left any sign of its location.
Then he seated himself on the bench again, contemplating his boots, looked up the road, stared out to sea, and then looked up the road again, tried to decipher some of the names carved on the bench, walked backward and forward, looking up the road at each turn he made, and in every way indicated the unpleasant effect of hope deferred.
Finally, however, after two hours of fruitless search, Mr. Putchett's eyes were rewarded by the sight of little Alice approaching the beach with a bathing-party. He at first hurried forward to meet her, but he was restrained by a sentiment found alike in curbstone-brokers and in charming young ladies—a feeling that it is not well to give one's self away without first being sufficiently solicited to do so.
He noticed, with a mingled pleasure and uneasiness, that little Alice did not at first recognize him, so greatly had his toilet altered his general appearance.
Even after he made himself known, he was compelled to submit to further delay, for the party had come to the beach to bathe, and little Alice must bathe, too.
She emerged from a bathing-house in a garb very odd to the eyes of Mr. Putchett, but one which did not at all change that gentleman's opinion of the wearer. She ran into the water, was thrown down by the surf, she was swallowed by some big waves and dived through others, and all the while the veteran operator watched her with a solicitude, which, despite his anxiety for her safety, gave him a sensation as delightful as it was strange.
The bath ended, Alice rejoined Mr. Putchett and conducted him to the spot where the wonderful shells with pink and yellow spots were found. The new shell-seeker was disgusted when the child shouted "Come along!" to several other children, and was correspondingly delighted when they said, in substance, that shells were not so attractive as once they were.
Mr. Putchett's researches in conchology were not particularly successful, for while he manfully moved about in the uncomfortable and ungraceful position peculiar to shell-seekers, he looked rather at the healthy, honest, eager little face near him than at the beach itself.