“Ah! if you could do that!” he replied, eagerly.

“I’ll see about it,” I said.  “Should you mind where you sailed to?”

“Not at all, not at all, my boy,” he answered, “so that I get your company.  You shall be skipper, or helmsman, or both, if you like.”

“Well, then,” I replied, “you might take me over to the Havre Gosselin, to see how my patient’s broken arm is going on.  It’s a bore there being no resident medical man there at this moment.  The accident last autumn was a great loss to the island.”

“Ah! poor fellow!” said Captain Carey, “he was a sad loss to them.  But I’ll take you over with pleasure, Martin; any day you fix upon.”

“Get the yacht ship-shape, then,” I said; “I think I can manage it on Thursday.”

I did not say at home whither I was bound on Thursday.  I informed them merely that Captain Carey and I were going out in his yacht for a few hours.  This was simply to prevent them from worrying themselves.

It was as delicious a spring morning as ever I remember.  As I rode along the flat shore between St. Peter-Port and St. Sampson’s, the fresh air from the sea played about my face, as if to drive dull care away, and make me as buoyant and debonair as itself.  The little waves were glittering and dancing in the sunshine, and chiming with the merry carols of the larks, outsinging one another in the blue sky overhead.  The numerous wind-mills, like children’s toys, which were pumping water out of the stone-quarries, whirled and spun busily in the brisk breeze.  Every person I met saluted me with a blithe and cheery greeting.  My dull spirits had been blown far away before I set foot on the deck of Captain Carey’s little yacht.

The run over was all that we could wish.  The cockle-shell of a boat, belonging to the yacht, bore me to the foot of the ladder hanging down the rock at Havre Gosselin.  A very few minutes took me to the top of the cliff, and there lay the little thatched, nest-like home of my patient.  I hastened forward eagerly.

The place seemed very solitary and deserted; and a sudden fear came across me.  Was it possible that she should be dead?  It was possible.  I had left her six days ago only just over a terrible crisis.  There might have been a relapse, a failure of vital force.  I might be come to find those shining eyes hid beneath their lids forever, and the pale, suffering face motionless in death.

Certainly the rhythmic motion of my heart was disturbed.  I felt it contract painfully, and its beating suspended for a moment or two.  The farmstead was intensely quiet, with the ominous stillness of death.  All the windows were shrouded with their check curtains.  There was no clatter of Suzanne’s wooden clogs about the fold or the kitchen.  If it had been Sunday, this supernatural silence would have been easily accounted for; but it was Thursday.  I scarcely dared go on and learn the cause of it.