It was after dark when Torode came in, and, without a word, bandaged my eyes tightly, and then called in two of his men, who shouldered me, and carried me up the companion and laid me in a boat.  The passage was a short one, about as far I thought as, say, from the anchorage at Herm to the landing-place.  Then they shouldered me again, and stumbled up a rocky way and along a passage where their feet echoed hollowly, and finally laid me down and went away.  Torode untied my hands and feet and took off the bandage.

By the light of his lantern I saw that I was in a rock room, with rough natural walls, and sweet salt air blowing in from the farther end.  There was food and water, and a mattress and blanket.  He left me without a word, and locked behind him a grating of stout iron bars which filled all the space between floor and roof.  I was long past puzzling over the meaning of it all.  I ate my food, and lay down and slept.

A shaft of sunlight awoke me, and I examined my new prison with care.  It was a bit of a natural rock passage, such as I had often seen on Sercq, formed, I have been told, by the decay of some softer material between two masses of rock.  It was about eight feet wide, and the roof, some twenty feet above my head, was formed by the falling together of the sides which sloped and narrowed somewhat at the entrance.  In length, my room was thirty paces from the iron grating to the opening in the face of the cliff.  This opening also was strongly barred with iron.  The floor of the passage broke off sharply there, and when I worked out a piece of rock from the side wall, and dropped it through the bars, it seemed to fall straight into the sea, a good hundred feet below.  The left-hand wall stopped a foot beyond the iron bars, but at the right hand the rock wall ran on for twenty feet or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the outlook.  I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed it in patches.

By squeezing hard against the bars where they were let into the rock on the right, I found I could just get a glimpse of the free blue sea rolling and tossing outside, and by dint of observation and much careful watching I learned where I was.

For, away out there among the tumbling blue waves, I could just make out a double-headed rock which the tide never covered, and I recognised it as the Grand Amfroque, one of our steering points in Great Russel.

So, then, I was in Herm, not four miles away from Brecqhou, and though, for any benefit the knowledge was to me, I might as well have been in America itself, it still warmed my heart to think that Carette was there, and almost within sight but for that wretched wall of rock.  If fiery longing could melt solid rock, that barrier had disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.