will so far as he was able.

Some comfort I found in thought of Aunt Jeanne, in whose wisdom I had much
faith; and in George Hamon, who knew my hopes and hated Torode; and in my
mother and my grandfather and Krok, who would render my love every help she
might ask, but were not so much in the way of it as the others. But, if
they all deemed me dead,--as by this time I feared they must, though,
indeed, they had refused to do so before,--my time might already be past,
and that which I cherished as hope might be even now but dead ashes.

At times I wondered if Jean Le Marchant had not had his suspicions of
Torode's treacheries, and how he would regard the young Torode as suitor
for Carette in that case. I was sure in my own mind that her father and
brothers would never yield her to anything but what they deemed the best
for her. But their ideas on that head might differ widely from my own, and
I drew small comfort from the thought.

And Carette herself? I hugged to myself the remembrance of her last
farewell. I lived on it. It might mean nothing more than the memory of our
old friendship. It might mean everything. I chose to believe it meant
everything. And I knew that even if I were dead she would never listen to
young Torode if a glimmer of the truth came to her ears, for she was the
soul of honour.

Then came a matter which at once added to my anxieties, and set work to my
hands which kept my mind from dwelling too darkly on its own troubles.

So crowded were all the war prisons up and down the land, and so continuous
was the stream of captives brought in by the war-ships, that death no
sooner made a vacancy amongst us than it was filled at once from the
overflowing quarters elsewhere.

We had fevers and agues constantly with us, and one time so sharp an
epidemic of small-pox that every man of us, will he nil he, had to submit
to the inoculation then newly introduced as a preventive against that most
horrible disease. Some of us believed, and rightly I think, that as good a
preventive as any against this or any ailment was the keeping of the body
in the fittest possible condition, and to that end we subjected ourselves
to the hardest exercise in every way we could contrive, and suffered I
think less than the rest.

As the long hard winter drew slowly past, and spring brightened the land
and our hearts, and set new life in both, my mind turned again to thoughts
of escape. While that bleak country lay in the grip of