"You can never tell—them photographs are so touched up," was the reply.
"There's no touching up of Osborne, is there?" giggled the other, looking at the motor-car photograph.
"No, indeed. He looks as if he had just done it," said the friend.
A lumbering omnibus took him to Tormouth. At the Swan Hotel he haggled about the terms, and chose a room at ten shillings per diem instead of the plutocratic apartment first offered at twelve and six. In the register he signed "R. Glyn, London," and at once wrote to Winter. He almost laughed when he found that Jenkins's address on the label was some street in North London, where that excellent man's sister dwelt.
He found that Tormouth possessed one great merit—an abundance of sea air. It was a quiet old place, a town of another century, cut off from the rush of modern life by the frenzied opposition to railways displayed by its local magnates fifty years earlier. Rupert could not have selected a better retreat. He dined, slept, ate three hearty meals next day, and slept again with a soundness that argued him free from care.
But newspapers reached even Tormouth, and, on the second morning after his arrival, Osborne's bitter mood returned when he read an account of Rose de Bercy's funeral. The crowds anticipated by Winter were there, the reporters duly chronicled Rupert's absence, and there could be no gainsaying the eagerness of the press to drag in his name on the slightest pretext.
But the arrows of outrageous fortune seemed to be less barbed when he found himself on a lonely path that led westward along the cliffs, and his eyes dwelt on the far-flung loveliness of a sapphire sea reflecting the tint of a turquoise sky. A pleasant breeze that just sufficed to chisel the surface of the water into tiny facets flowed lazily from the south. From the beach, some twenty feet or less beneath the low cliff, came the murmur of a listless tide. On the swelling uplands of Dorset shone glorious patches of gold and green, with here and there a hamlet or many-ricked farm, while in front, a mile away, the cliff climbed with a gentle curve to a fine headland that jutted out from the shore-line like some great pier built by a genie for the caravels of giants. It was a morning to dispel shadows, and the cloud lifted from Rupert's heart under its cheery influence. He stopped to light a cigar, and from that moment Rupert's regeneration was complete.
"It is a shame to defile this wonderful atmosphere with tobacco smoke," he mused, "so I must salve my conscience by burning incense to the spirit of the place. That sort of spirit is invariably of the female gender. Where is the lady? Invisible, of course."
Without the least expectation of discovering either fay or mortal on the yellow sands that spread their broad highway between sea and cliff, Rupert stepped off the path on to the narrow strip of turf that separated it from the edge and looked down at the beach. Greatly to his surprise, a girl sat there, painting. She had rigged a big Japanese umbrella to shield herself and her easel from the sun. Its green-hued paper cover, gay with pink dragons and blue butterflies, brought a startling note of color into the placid foreground. The girl, or young woman, wore a very smart hat, but her dress was a grayish brown costume, sufficiently indeterminate in tint to conceal the stains of rough usage in climbing over rocks, or forcing a way through rank vegetation. Indeed, it was chosen, in the first instance, so that a dropped brush or a blob of paint would not show too vivid traces; and this was well, for some telepathic action caused the wearer to lift her eyes to the cliff the very instant after Rupert's figure broke the sky-line above the long grasses nodding on the verge. The result was lamentable. She squeezed half a tube of crimson lake over her skirt in a movement of surprise at the apparition.