“I was coming from school—­”

“All alone?”

“Yes, all alone.  The others had gone on; I’d been kept in, and it was nearly dark.  It was blowing hard, and when I got to the first rock here I thought it was going to blow me over.  So I went down on my hands and knees and was just going to crawl, when old Hirzel Mollet came down the other side with a great sheaf of wheat on his back.  He was taking it to the Seigneur for his tithes.  And then in a moment he gave a shout and I saw he was gone.”

“That was terrible.  What did you do?”

“I screamed and crawled back across the narrow bit to the cutting, and ran screaming up to the cottages at Plaisance, and Thomas Carre and his men came running down.  But they could do nothing.  They went round in a boat from the Creux, but he was dead.”

“And how did you get home?”

“Thomas Carre took me across and I ran on alone, but it was months before I could forget poor old Hirzel Mollet.”

“I should think so, indeed.  That was a terrible thing to see.”

The opening of the mines, and the influx of the Welsh and Cornishmen and their wives and children, with their new and up-to-date ideas of living and dressing, had wrought a great and not altogether wholesome change upon the original inhabitants.

All the week they were hard at work in their fields or their boats, but on Sunday the lonely lanes leading to Little Sark were thronged with sightseers, curious to inspect the mines and the latest odd fashions among the miners’ wives and daughters.

Odd, and extremely useless little parasols, were then the vogue in England.  The miners’ women-folk flaunted these before the dazzled eyes of the Sark girls, and Sark forthwith burst into flower of many-coloured parasols.

The mine ladies dressed in printed cottons of strange and wonderful patterns.  The Sark girls must do the same.

“Tiens!” ejaculated Nance more than once, as they walked.  “Here is Judi Le Masurier with a new pink parasol!—­and a straw bonnet with green strings!—­and every day you’ll see her about the fields without so much as a sun-bonnet on!  And Rachel Guille has got a new print dress all red roses and lilac!  Mon Gyu, what are we coming to!”

She had many such comments and still more unspoken ones.  But Stephen Gard, glancing, whenever he could do so unperceived, at the trim but plainly-dressed little sun-bonneted figure by his side, vowed in his heart that the whole of these others rolled into one were not to be compared with her, and that he would give all the silver in the mines of Sark to win her appreciation and regard.

As they turned the corner at Vauroque, they came suddenly on a number of men lounging on the low wall, and among them Tom Hamon, pipe in mouth and hands in pockets.

As they passed he made some jocular remark in the patois which provoked a guffaw from the rest, and reddened Nance’s face, and caused Bernel to glance up at Gard and jerk round angrily towards Tom.