ing but getting all they can. It is sickening."

"S--s--s--s--t!" signalled the boy suddenly, at the sound of steps and
voices on the cliff outside and close at hand.

"Tom," muttered the boy.

"And Peter Mauger," murmured the girl, and they both shrank lower into
their hiding-place.

It was a tiny natural chamber in the sharp slope of the hill. Ages ago
the massive granite boulders of the headland, loosened and undercut by
the ceaseless assaults of wind and weather and the deadly quiet fingers
of the frost, had come rolling down the slope till they settled afresh
on new foundations, forming holes and crannies and little angular
chambers where the splintered shoulders met. In time, the soil silted
down and covered their asperities, and--like a good colonist--carrying
in itself the means of increase, it presently brought forth and
blossomed, and the erstwhile shattered rocks were royally robed in
russet and purple, and green and gold.

Among these fantastic little chambers Nance had played as a child, and
had found refuge in them from the persecutions of her big half-brother,
Tom Hamon. Tom was six when she was born--fourteen accordingly when she
was at the teasable age of eight, and unusually tempting as a victim by
reason of her passionate resentment of his unwelcome attentions.

She hated Tom, and Tom had always resented her and her mother's
intrusion into the family, and Bernel's, when he came, four years after
Nance.

What his father wanted to marry again for, Tom never could make out. His
lack of training and limited powers of expression did not indeed permit
him any distinct reasoning on the matter, but the feeling was there--a
dull resentment which found its only vent and satisfaction in stolid
rudeness to his stepmother and the persecution of Nance and Bernel
whenever occasion offered.

The household was not therefore on too happy a footing.

It consisted, at the time when our story opens, of--Old Mrs.
Hamon--Grannie--half of whose life had been lived in the nineteenth
century and half in the eighteenth. She had seen all the wild doings of
the privateering and free-trading days, and recalled as a comparatively
recent event the raiding of the Island by the men of Herm, though that
happened forty years before.

She was for the most part a very reserved and silent old lady, but her
tongue could bite like a whip when the need arose.

She occupied her own dower-rooms in the house, and rarely went outside