Later, when it had actually been decided to embark upon the scheme, he said to Mr. Trupp one day in his brightest manner:
"Should be a paying proposition, sir, with you behind it."
The old surgeon eyed his chaffeur through his pince-nez shrewdly.
"If you like to put £3,000 or so into it, Alfred, you wouldn't do yourself any harm," he said.
Alf sheathed his eyes in that swift bird-like way of his, and tittered.
"Three thousand pounds!" he said. "Me!" ....
A few days later when Mr. Trupp called at the Colonel's tiny villa in Meads. Mrs. Lewknor ran out to him, eager as a girl.
She had received from Messrs. Morgan and Evans, the solicitors in Terminus Road, an offer of the sum required on behalf of a client on the security of a first mortgage.
"It's a miracle!" she cried, her eyes sparkling like jewels.
"Or a ramp!" said the Colonel from behind. "D'you know anything about the firm, Trupp?"
"I've known and employed em ever since I've been here," replied the old surgeon. "They're as old as Beachbourne and a bit older. A Lewes firm really, and they still have an office there. But as the balance of power shifted East they shifted with it."
"They don't say who their client is," commented the Colonel.
That afternoon he drove down to Terminus Road, and leaving Alf in the car outside, entered the office.
He and Mr. Morgan were old friends who might truly be accounted among the founders of modern Beachbourne.
"Who's your client?" asked Mr. Trupp, gruff and grinning. "Out with it!"
Mr. Morgan shook his smooth grey head, humour and mystery lurking about his mouth and in his eyes.
"Wishes to remain anonymous," he said. "We're empowered to act on his behalf."
He strolled to the window and peeped out, tilting on his toes to overlook the screen which obscured the lower half of it.
What he saw seemed to amuse him, and his amusement seemed to re-act in its turn on Mr. Trupp.
"As a rock," came the voice from the window.
The other seemed satisfied; the contract forthwith was signed; and Mrs. Lewknor bought her site.
Cow Gap was an ideal spot for the hostel.
It is carved out of the flank of Beau-nez; the gorse-covered hill encircling it in huge green rampart that shelters it from the prevailing Sou-West gales. Embedded in the majestic bluff that terminates the long line of the South Downs and juts out into the sea in the semblance of a lion asleep, head on his paws, it opens a broad green face to the sea and rising sun. The cliff here is very low, and the chalk-strewn beach, easy of access from above, is seldom outraged by skirmishers from the great army peopling the sands along the front towards the Redoubt and the far Crumbles. A spur of the hill shuts it off from the aristocratic quarter of the town, known as Meads, which covers with gardened villas the East-ward foot-hills of Beau-nez and ceases abruptly at the bottom of the Duke's Drive that sweeps up the Head in graceful curves.