red
sail.

We carried more way than I had reckoned for, and--the Princess having
no science to help me--this brought us crashing in among a press of
boats huddled in the black shadow alongside the quay-steps with such
force as almost to stave in the upper timbers of a couple and sink
them where they lay. No voice challenged us. I wondered at this as
I gripped at the dark dew-drenched canvas to haul it inboard, and
while I wondered, a strong light shone down upon us from the quay's
edge.

A man stood there, holding a torch high over his head and shading his
eyes as he peered down at the boat--a tall man in a Trappist habit
girt high on his naked legs almost to the knees.

"My father?" I demanded. "Where is my father?"

He made no answer, but signed to us to make our landing, and waited
for us, still holding the torch high while I helped the Princess from
one boat to another and so to the slippery steps.

"My father?" I demanded again.

He turned and led us along the quay to a stairway cut in the living
rock. At the foot of it he lowered his torch for a moment that we
might see and step aside. Two bodies lay there--two of his brethren,
stretched side by side and disposedly, with arms crossed on their
breasts, ready for burial. High on the stairway, where it entered
the base of a battlemented wall under an arch of heavy stonework, a
solitary monk was drawing water from a well and sluicing the steps.
The water ran past our feet, and in the dawn (now paling about us) I
saw its colour. . . .

The burnt building--it had been the Genoese barracks--stood high on
the right of the stairway. Its roof had fallen in upon the flames
raging through its wooden floors, so that what had been but an hour
ago a blazing furnace was now a shell of masonry out of which a cloud
of smoke rolled lazily, to hang about the upper walls of the
fortress. Through its window-spaces, void and fire-smirched, as now
and again the reek lifted, I saw the pale upper-sky with half a dozen
charred ends of roof-timber sharply defined against it--a black and
broken grid; and while yet I stared upward another pair of monks
crossed the platform above the archway. They carried a body between
them--the body of a man in the Genoese uniform--and were bearing it
towards a bastion on the western side, that overhung the sea.
There the battlements hid them from me; but by-and-by I heard a
splash. . . .

By this time we were mounting the stairway. We p