cannot imagine;
and so--all thanks to the sweet, sharp soul who took her mother's place.

See these two, then, as they lay in the sweet short herbage of Tintageu or
Moie de Mouton, chins on fist, crisp light hair close up alongside floating
brown curls, caps or hats scorned impediments to rapid motion, bare heels
kicking up emotionally behind, as they surveyed their little world, and
watched the distant ships, and dreamed dreams and saw visions.

Very clear in my memory is one such day, by reason of the fact that it was
the beginning of a new and highly satisfactory state of matters between the
boy and the girl.

Carette, you understand, was practically prisoner on Brecqhou except at
such times as the higher powers, for good reasons of their own, put her
ashore on Sercq. And, often as this happened, there were still many times
when she would have been there but could not.

She had startled her companion more than once by wild threats of swimming
the Gouliot, which is a foolhardy feat even for a man, for the dark passage
is rarely free from coiling undercurrents, which play with a man as though
he were no more than a piece of seaweed, and try even a strong swimmer's
nerve and strength. And when she spoke so, the boy took her sharply to
task, and drew most horrible pictures of her dead white body tumbling about
among the Autelets, or being left stranded in the rock pools by Port du
Moulin, nibbled by crabs and lobsters and pecked by hungry gulls; or,
maybe, lugged into a sea-cave by a giant devil-fish and ripped into pieces
by his pitiless hooked beak.

At all of which the silvery little voice would say "Pooh!" But all the same
the slim little figure would shiver in the hot sunshine inside its short
blue linsey-woolsey frock, and the dark eyes would grow larger than ever at
the prospect, especially at the ripping by the giant pieuvre, in which they
both believed devoutly, and eventually she would promise not to throw her
young life away.

"But all the same, Phil, I do feel like trying it when I want over and they
won't let me."

And--"Don't be a silly," the boy would say. "If you go and get yourself
drowned, in any stupid way like that, Carette, I'll never speak to you
again as long as I live."

They were lying so one day on the altar rock behind Tintageu, the boy
gazing dreamily into the vast void past the distant Casquets, where,
somewhere beyond and beyond, lay England, the land of many
wonders,--England, wher