ittle auberge, or rather cabaret, affected by
fishermen, and the folk of the _Landes_, off grey mullet, fresh from
the Bay of Biscay, grilled over a fire of pine-cones, with a second
course of ring-doves roasted before it.

After their coffee Tinker suggested that they should cross over to the
strip of sand which at that point separates the Gulf from the Bay, and
the others fell in with his humour. They crossed over and landed in
the yacht's dinghy. Tinker insisted on taking two rugs, though both
Dorothy and his father objected that the sand was quite dry enough to
sit on. However, when they came to the beach of the Bay, Sir Tancred
spread them out, and he and Dorothy sat on them. The two children
wandered away, and presently Elsie found herself holding Tinker's hand,
and running hard through the pines towards the landing-place.

In answer to Tinker's hail, Alphonse fetched them aboard in the dingey,
and the honest, unsuspecting mariners accepted his instructions to take
them for a cruise, and come back later for his father and the lady,
without a murmur. But no sooner was the _Petrel_ under weigh, than he
strode to the middle of the quarter-deck, folded his arms, scowled
darkly in the direction of his father and Dorothy, so heedless of their
plight, and growled in his hoarsest, most piratical voice:

"Marooned! Marooned!"

Slowly he paced the deck, with arms still folded, casting the piercing
glances of a bird of prey across the waters; then of a sudden he roared
once more with the true piratical hoarseness, "All hands on deck to
splice the main brace!"

Alphonse and Adolphe did not understand his nautical English; but when
Elsie came from the cabin with a bottle of cognac and two glasses,
their slow, wide grins showed a perfect comprehension. Tinker gave
them the cognac, and took the wheel. Then he became absorbed in
steering, and sternly rejected all further consideration of his gift;
he would have neither hand nor part in hocussing French
agriculturalists posing as mariners.

But for all his absorption in his steering, and his care to look past
them as they sat in more than fraternal affection on the deck, with the
bottle between them, it was somehow forced on him, probably by the
noise they made, that they proceeded from a gentle cheerfulness through
a wild and songful hilarity, broken by interludes in which either
described to the other with eloquent enthusiasm the charms of the lass
who loved him b