r!" he said, gazing vaguely at them all. "But who--"

"We haven't found out yet. But even the thickest of the thickheads can't
put it down to you"--and the thickheads present grinned in friendly
fashion, and they ran up the sail with a will, and turned her nose, and
went racing back to the Creux quicker than they had come.

And Gard sat still with his hand in Nance's two, feeling very weak and
shaky, and looked vaguely back at L'Etat as it faded and dwindled into a
dim black triangle of rock.

CHAPTER XXXVI

HOW HE CAME HOME FROM L'ETAT

This is what had happened.

Since Tom Hamon's death, his friend Peter and his widow Julie had, as we
know, found themselves drawn together by a common detestation of Stephen
Gard and a common desire for his extinction.

For Peter considered he had been supplanted in Nance's regards, though
Nance had never regarded him as anything but a nuisance and a boor. And
Julie considered herself scorned and slighted, though Gard had never
considered her save as Tom Hamon's wife.

It was they who had stirred up the Sark men against Gard, and they
missed no opportunity of keeping their ill brew on the boil.

Their offensive alliance brought them much together. Peter was often at
La Closerie. He was like wax in the hands of the fiery Frenchwoman, and
she moulded him to her will. The neighbours might have begun to talk,
but that it was obvious to all that the only bond between them at
present was their ill-will towards Gard, and in that feeling many shared
and found nothing strange in Tom's wife and Tom's chief friend joining
hands to make some one pay for his death.

In time, if it had gone on, the neighbours would doubtless have had
plenty to say on the subject, for old wives' tongues rattled fast of a
winter's evening, when they all gathered in this house or that, and sat
on the sides of the green bed with their feet in the dry fern inside,
and the oil crasset hanging down in the midst, and plied their needles
and their tongues and wits all at once, and wrought scandalously good
guernseys and stockings in spite of it all.

But these were summer evenings yet, and the _veilles_ had not begun, and
reputations were out at grass till the time came round for their
inspection and judgment.

And so, when Peter Mauger never reached home the night before this day
of which we are telling, his old housekeeper, whatever she thought about
it at the time, only said afterwards that she suppos