at on the great rocks at
Port Gorey which had in those olden times served for a jetty, while he
told them how Peter Le Pelley had mortgaged the island to further his
quest after the silver, and how a whole ship-load of it sank within a
stone's throw of the place where they sat, and with it the Seigneur's
hopes and fortunes.

They peered into the old houses and down the disused shafts, lined now
with matted growth of ivy and clinging ferns,--the bottomless pits
into which the Le Pelley heritage had disappeared. Then he took them
for mild refection to Mrs. Mollet's cottage; and after a rest,--and
with their gracious permission, a pipe,--he led them across to the
wild south walls of the island, with their great chasms and fissures
and tumbled strata, their massive pinnacles, and deep narrow inlets
and tunnels where the waves champed and roared in everlasting
darkness.

The dogs harried the rabbits untiringly, Punch in long lithe bounds
that were a joy to behold; Scamp in panting hysterics which gave
over-ample warning of his coming and precluded all possibilities of
capture.

Graeme led them down the face of the cliff fronting L'Etac, the great
rock island that was once a part of Little Sark itself.

"Once upon a time there was a Coupee across here," he said. "Some time
our Coupee will disappear and Little Sark will be an island also."

"Not before we get back, I hope," said Miss Penny.

"Not before we get back, _I_ hope," said Graeme, for would he not hold
Margaret's hand again on the homeward journey?

Down the cliff, along white saw-teeth of upturned veins of quartz,
with Margaret's hand in his, then back for Miss Penny, till they sat
looking down into a deep dark basin, almost circular: lined with the
most lovely pink and heliotrope corallines: studded with anemones,
brown and red and green: every point and ledge decked with
delicately-fronded sea-ferns and mosses: and the whole overhung with
threatening masses of rock.

"Venus's Bath," he told them. "Those round stones at the bottom have
churned about in there for hundreds of years, I suppose. The tide
fills it each time, as you will see presently, but the stones cannot
get out and they've helped to make their own prison-house,--wherein I
perceive a moral. It's a delicious plunge from that rock."

"You bathe here?" asked Margaret.

"I and the dogs bathe here at times. There's one other thing you must
see, and I think you may see it to-day. The tide is rig