, in the end, he took Grannie's advice and found a
room in one of the thatch-roofed cottages which offered their
white-washed shoulders to the road just where it rose out of the further
side of the Coupee into Sark.

They were quiet, farmer-fisher folk who lived there, having nothing to
do with the mines and little beyond a general interest in them.

When not at work, he was thrown much upon himself, and if in his rambles
he chanced upon Bernel Hamon it was a treat, and if, as happened all too
seldom, upon Nance as well, an enjoyment beyond words.

But Nance was a busy maid, with hens and chickens, and cows and calves,
and pigs and piglets claiming her constant attention, and it was only
now and again that she could so arrange her duties as to allow of a
flight with Bernel--a flight which always took the way to the sea and
developed presently into a bathing revel wherein she flung cares and
clothes to the winds, or into a fishing excursion, in which pleasure and
profit and somewhat of pain were evenly mixed.

For, though she loved the sea and ate fresh-caught fish with as much
gusto as any, she hated seeing them caught--almost as much as she hated
having her fowls or piglets slaughtered for eating purposes, and never
would touch them--a delicacy of feeling at which Bernel openly scoffed
but could not laugh her out of.

She had sentiments also regarding the rabbits Bernel shot on the cliffs,
but being wild, and she herself having had no hand in their upbringing
and not having known them intimately, she accepted them as natural
provision, though not without compunctions at times concerning possible
families of orphans left totally unprovided for.

When she did permit herself a few hours off duty she did it with a
whole-hearted enjoyment--approaching the naive abandon of
childhood--which, to Gard's sober restraint, when he was graciously
permitted to witness it, was wholly charming.

By degrees, and especially after her father's tragic death, Nance's
feelings towards the stranger had perceptibly changed.

He might be an alien, an Englishman; but he was at all events a
Cornishman, and she had heard say that the men of Cornwall and of the
Islands and of the Bretagne had much in common, just as their rugged
coasts had. And England, after all, was allied to the Islands, belonged
to them in fact, and was indeed quite as essential a part of the Queen's
dominions as the Islands themselves, and to harbour unfriendly feelin