y monsieur on the rock, is it,
little Nance? And with nothing on but that! Oh shame! What will the
neighbours say when they hear how you swim across to him, and you will
not dare deny it?"

But Nance, relieved in her mind on the score of ghosts, and regaining
her composure with her breath, simply turned her back on her and
proceeded as if she were not there.

"And he is there still!" screamed Julie, dancing round with rage to keep
face to face with her. "I was sure of it, though those fools could not
find him. I'll see that he's found or starved out, b'en sur! Yes, if I
have to go myself and see to it. As for you--shameless one!--it's the
last time you'll swim across there, yes indeed!"--and she raved on and
on, as only an angry woman with a grievance can.

Nance slipped her dress over her head and, under cover of it, dropped
off her wet undergarment, coolly wrung it out, put on her cloak and
walked away, Julie raging alongside with wild words that tumbled over
one another in their haste.

Nance walked to the highest point behind Breniere, and waved her white
garment a dozen times to let Gard know she was safe, and then turned and
set off home through the waist-high bracken and the great cushions of
gorse. And close alongside her went Julie, raging and raving the worse
for her silence; for there is nothing so galling to an angry soul as to
find its most venomous shafts fall harmless from the triple mail of
quiet self-possession.

So they came through the other cottages to La Closerie, but the
neighbours were all asleep, and those who woke at the sound of her
violence, turned over and said, "It's only that mad Frenchwoman in one
of her tantrums. Why, in Heaven's name, can't she go to sleep, like
other folks?"

Nance went into her own house and quietly closed the door. Julie
hammered on it with her fists, as she would dearly have liked to hammer
on Nance's face, and then cursed herself off into her own place,
slamming the door with such violence as to waken all the fowls and set
all the pigs grunting in their sleep.

CHAPTER XXXV

HOW AN ANGEL CAME BRINGING THE TRUTH

Gard's eyes, straining into the dimness of the coming dawn through what
seemed to him a most terrible long time, so packed was it with anxious
fears, caught at last the white flicker of Nance's signal, and he
dropped down just where he stood, among the rough stones of the ridge,
with a grateful sigh.

The strain was telling on him. He f