With a sigh he started to put it back in the embroidered case where he had found it. But that required too great an effort of self-denial.
"I'd like to wear it a few minutes; where'll be the harm?" he thought. "Of course, I wont let any accident happen to it."
He looked at the time again; it was half-past six. The two or three men boarders who remained with Mrs. Murcher (for it was now late in the season) had gone yachting, and the ladies were at tea. It was an hour of leisure with Olly, and having put on his new rig, he thought it would be pleasant to take a stroll on the beach, a sort of rehearsal of his rôle of "walking gentleman," before going that evening to show himself to the admiring natives at Frog-End. He couldn't resist the temptation to carry the watch, on this preliminary excursion; buttoning the guard and seal under the top buttons of his coat, so that they shouldn't be observed as he left the house.
"I only wish she could see me!" he whispered blushingly to himself, as he went down the stairs.
"She" was Miss Amy Canfield, the youngest of the lady boarders, and in his eyes the prettiest. She had been kind to Olly, as, indeed, the most of the boarders had been; and it put him into a warm glow, from his cheeks to his shins, as he thought of meeting her surprised gaze.
But Amy was at tea with the rest, and as oblivious of him at that moment as if he had never existed. So he passed out of the house unnoticed, and went to enjoy his little strut alone; unbuttoning his coat again, and glancing down at the superb chain and seal, as he took the sandy path to the beach.
"If I see the Susette," he said,—for that was the name of the yacht,—"I'll hurry back, and have the watch in its place again long before Mr. Hatville lands."
This he fully intended to do. But neither from the intervening sand-hills, nor from the shore itself, which he reached after a short walk from the boarding-house, was the yacht anywhere to be seen.
The sea had gone down rapidly since the recent gale. It rolled on the beach, in breakers made dark and turbid by the sea-weed which, uptorn by the storm and mixed with sand, still tumbled and washed to and fro in the waves.
"Wind's got around square in the west," observed Olly. "The yacht'll have a mean time beating up!"