A couple of burly husbands came rolling round the corner towards their breakfasts and caught her words.

“Doubt you’ll have to go alone, mistress,” said one, phlegmatically.  “There’s ghosts on L’Etat, they do say, though sure the one John Drillot brought across was dead enough.”

“If he’s there,” said the other, plumbing Julie’s feelings, “he’s safe as a pig in a pen.”

“Where’s our Peter?” demanded Mrs. Guille.

“Peter?  I d’n know.  What’s come of him?” and they stared blankly at her.

“He went to Little Sark last night to see her”—­with a beck of distaste towards Julie—­“and he’s never come home.”

The men looked from the speaker to Julie, as though the next word necessarily lay with her.

“I never set eyes on him.  I was out after that girl.  I came here to tell him about Gard.  Has he been to the harbour?”

“No, he hasn’t.  We are from there now.”

“He’s maybe with some of them arranging about going to L’Etat,” said Julie.  “I’ll go and find out;” and she set off along the road past the windmill.

The morning passed in fruitless enquiries.  She asked this one and that, every one she could think of, if they had seen Peter, and was met everywhere with meaning grins and point-blank denials.  Apparently no one had set eyes on Peter, and every one seemed to imply that she ought io know more about him than any one else.

It was past mid-day before she was back at Vauroque, but Mrs. Guilie was still standing in the doorway of Peter’s empty house as if she had been looking out for news of him ever since.

“Eh b’en?  Have you found him?” she cried.

“Not a finger of him!” snapped Julie savagely, tired out with her fruitless labours.

“Then he’s come to some ill, ba su.  And if he has—­ma fe, it’s you!—­it’s you!” The old lady’s scream of denunciation choked itself with its own excess, and the neighbours came running out to learn the news.

Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille’s had been groping along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope that Peter would still turn up all right.

Now that her hope was shattered her mind dropped naturally into a grim groove, along which it had taken a tentative trip during the morning and had recoiled from with a shudder.

The last time Mrs. Tom Hamon had come seeking a man who was missing, that man had been found under the Coupee, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft for the Coupee as fast as her old legs and her want of breath and general agitation would let her.

“Nom de Dieu!  What—?” began Julie, with twisted black brows, and then drifted on with the rest in Mrs. Guille’s wake—­all except one or two housewives whose men were due for dinner, and knew they must be fed whatever had come to Peter Mauger.

“Gaderabotin!” said one of these as he came up, and stood scratching his head and gazing down the road after them.  “What’s taken them all?”