And yet--and yet-- Suddenly another sound broke through the stillness, and in a moment he had sprung to alertness.

It was a cry--a sharp, wrung cry from the garden close to him, the garden of the hotel, and instantly following it a flood of angry speech in a man's voice and the sound of blows.
"Damnation!" said Saltash, and sprang for a narrow wooden door in the stone wall a few yards higher up.
It opened to his imperious hand, and he found himself in a dark little shrubbery behind an arbour that looked out to the sea.

It was in this arbour that the scuffle was taking place, and in a second he had forced his way through the intervening shrubs and was at the entrance.
"Damnation!" he burst forth again furiously.

"What are you doing?
Leave that boy alone!" A man in evening-dress was gripping a fair-haired lad, who wore the hotel-livery, by the back of his neck and raining merciless blows upon his uncovered head.

He turned, sharply straightening himself, at Saltash's tempestuous entrance, and revealed to the newcomer the deeply-suffused countenance of the hotel-manager.
Their recognition was mutual.