Carre was one of the most intelligent and
deep-thinking men I have ever met.

Her nearest neighbour and chief friend was Jeanne Falla of Beaumanoir,
widow of Peter Le Marchant, whose brother John lived on Brecqhou and made a
certain reputation there both for himself and the island. She was old
enough to have been Rachel's mother, and Rachel may have confided in her.
If she did so her confidence was never abused, for Jeanne Falla could talk
more and tell less than any woman I ever knew, and that I count a very
great accomplishment.

She was a Guernsey woman by birth, but had lived on Sercq for over twenty
years. Her husband was drowned while vraicking a year after they were
married, and she had taken the farm in hand and made more of it than ever
he would have done if he had lived to be a hundred, for the Le Marchants
always tended more to the sea than to the land, though Jeanne Falla's
Peter, I have been told, was more shore-going than the rest. She had no
child of her own, and that was the only lack in her life. She made up for
it by keeping an open heart to all other children, whereby many gained
through her loss, and her loss turned to gain even for herself.

When Rachel's boy came she made as much of him as if he had been her own.
And the two between them named him Philip Carre after his
grandfather,--instinct, maybe, or possibly simply with the idea of pleasing
the old man, whose heart had never come fully round to the
marriage,--happily done, whatever the reason.

For Martel, outside business matters, which needed a clear head and all a
man's wits about him unless he wanted to run himself and his cargoes into
trouble, soon proved himself unstable as water. The nature of his business
tended to conviviality. Successful runs were celebrated, and fresh ones
planned, and occasional losses consoled, in broached kegs which cost
little. Success or failure found equal satisfaction in the flowing bowl,
and no home happiness ever yet came out of a bung-hole.

Then, too, Rachel Carre had been brought up by her father in a simple,
perhaps somewhat rigorous, faith, which in himself developed into
Quakerism. I have thought it not impossible that in that might be found
some explanation of her action in marrying Paul Martel. Perhaps her father
drew the lines somewhat tightly, and her opening life craved width and
colour, and found the largest possibilities of them in the rollicking young
stranger. Truly he brought colour enoug