ng through the Gouliot caves behind Krok's tapping
stick. And we talked of Aunt Jeanne's party, and our Riding Day, and Black
Boy, and Gray Robin. And she told me much of the Miss Maugers, and their
school, and her school-fellows. And at times she fell silent, and I knew
she had sudden thought of her brother Helier. But, you see, she had so
long thought of him as dead, that the fact that he had died later than she
had supposed had not the power to cloud her greatly. And perhaps the fact
that we were together, and going to part no more, was not without its
effect on her spirits.

And I told her more fully than I had done of all that had happened to me on
Herm, and on the French ship in the West Indies, and at Amperdoo, and of
our escape into France in the preventive officers' boat, and of that last
desperate pull across from Surtainville.

"But, mon Gyu, Phil, what a strange man!" she said of Torode. "Why should
he let you live one time, and try his hardest to kill you another?"

"I do not know. I have puzzled over it to no purpose. Now I have given it
up."

"He is perhaps mad," she suggested.

"He did not seem so, except in not making an end of me when he had the
chance, and that truly was madness on his part."

The time was never long with us, for we were strangely set apart from time
and its passage. We ate and slept, and talked and walked, just whenever the
inclination came, and measurements of time we had none. But Aunt Jeanne's
pie was finished and we were down to the ham bone, and what little bread
and gache we had left was growing hard, and by that Carette said we had
been there at least three days, and we looked for George Hamon's coming at
any moment, except when the tunnel was growling and the Boutiques roaring
and sobbing.

CHAPTER XXXIV

HOW LOVE FOUGHT DEATH IN THE DARK

I woke from a very sound sleep with a start, and lay with a creeping of the
back and half asleep still, wondering what I had heard.

It was dark, with a blackness of darkness to be felt, and all was very
still, which meant that the tide was out, so it was probably early morning.
But it seemed to me that a sound unusual to the place lingered in my ear,
and I lay with straining senses.

It was not such a sound, it seemed to me, as Carette might have made in her
sleep or in wakening, but something altogether foreign and discordant.

Whether, in my sudden wakening, I had made some sound, I do not know, but
there had been h