"Who do you mean?" Jon protested. "What's all the excitement?"

"Miss Ballinger, you idiot! She came out of the Refreshment place there with such a peculiar-looking man. There they are! Look! They're getting a taxi."

Jon was just in time to see their travelling companion's broad back filling the taxi door and a small, slight man with a black hat getting in after her.

"The thing which was peculiar about her was the man with her. He wore a most sinister black hat - the sort of hat that nobody who isn't sinister wears. He had very black sloping eyebrows, if you know what I mean, and a very small sloping black moustache thing on his lip... I tell you what I think he is, Jon... I think he's in a band somewhere and I don't think he's English either... I tell you another thing, Jon. I think that if he hadn't been carrying her bags he'd have been waving his arms about. That's the sort of man he was," she finished triumphantly.

"I don't see that it matters," Jon persisted. "How did she act, anyway?"

Penny looked puzzled. "Come to think of it," she said, "she seemed different. I can't quite explain... Anyway, what does Auntie say and where's the car?"

"Just coming," Jon said. "Here! Lean against this wall. It's beautifully hot."

So they leaned against the station wall in the sunshine. Faintly, there came to them the smell of hot tar and oil and, fainter still, the smell of the sea.

"Funny," said Jon after a little, "but seaside towns always smell different, don't they? I like it."

"I like smells, too," Penny agreed. "And here comes a green car and it looks old enough to be ours... I say, Jon, if that's Fred Vasson, I like him."

The car swept round the station approach and pulled up opposite them.

"You'll be Master Jonathan and Miss Penelope?" asked the driver, in a slow drawl, as he got out. His eyes were very blue and, as he touched his old felt hat, they noticed that his hair was fair. It was difficult to judge his age because his brown face was a mass of wrinkles which ran all together as he smiled.

"You'll have been worried maybe," he went on, "and I'm right sorry I be late, but start she wouldn't, and I'm not much of a hand at the engines. But we be all right now, and I'll soon have you home.

Fred showed them the ruins of the ancient castle on the cliff top; then they crawled up the narrow street of the old fishing village which snuggled between two hills, with railed pavements as high as the roof of the car.

"Reckon tides 'ud cum right up street in old days," Fred explained. "Sometimes now when wind's south-west and tides are high we get trouble round these parts."