sight by an over-hanging piece of rock, but she seemed to be watching someone coming slowing up it.  Then she glanced fearfully round, and saw Peter standing on the top of the cliff.  She made a hasty sign to the person below, but already a man’s hand leaning on a stick was visible beyond the edge of the rock.  Peter strode straight down the face of the cliff to the turning in the path.  Louise screamed.  Peter seized by the collar a puny, crooked creature, whom he scarcely stopped to look at, and held him, as one might a cat, over the cliff-side.

“Swear you’ll quit the island to-night, or I’ll drop you,” he thundered.

The creature merely screamed for mercy, and seemed unable to articulate a sentence; while Louise knelt, clasping Peter’s knees in an agony of entreaty.  Meanwhile, the screaming ceased; the creature had fainted in Peter’s grasp.  He flung him down on the path, said sternly to Louise, “Come with me,” and they went up the cliff-side together.

They walked home without a word, Louise crying and moaning a little, but not daring to speak.  When they got inside the cabin, he stood and faced her.

“Woman,” he said, in a low, shaken voice, “What hast thou done?”

She fell upon her knees, crying.  “Forgive me, Peter,” she entreated.  “Thou art such a strong man; forgive me.”

“Tell me the whole truth.  What is this man to thee?”

She knelt in silence, shaken with sobs.

“Who is he?” said Peter, his voice getting deeper and hoarser.

She only kept moaning, “Forgive me.”  Presently she said between her sobs, “I only went this morning to tell him to go away.  I wanted him to go away; I have prayed him to go again and again.”

“Since when hast thou known him?”

Again she made no answer, but inarticulate moans.

Peter stood looking at her for a few seconds with an indescribable expression of sorrow and aversion.

“I loved thee,” he said; and turning away, left her.

CHAPTER III.

Peter went out in the evening without speaking to Louise again, and was not seen till the following afternoon, when he called his mate to go mackerel-fishing, and they were absent two days getting a great haul.  He came back and slept at Mesurier’s, and did not go near his own home for a week, though he sent money to Louise, when he sold the fish.

At the end of that time he went over to Jean’s.  The stranger had gone, but Peter sat down on a stool opposite Jean, and began to enter into conversation with him, with a more settled look in his hollow eyes than had been there since the catastrophe of the week before.  The meeting on the cliff had been seen by more than one passerby, and the report had spread that Peter had nearly murdered the stranger for intriguing with his wife.  Jean told Peter all he knew of the man, but he neither knew his business nor whence he came.  He said his name was Jacques, and would give no other.  He had gone to the nearest inland town, where he said that a relation of his kept an “auberge.”  He had gone in a hurry, and had left some bottles and things behind, containing the stuff he rubbed his leg with, Jean thought; and Jean meant to take them to him when next he went to the town.