To any man—­even to our warders—­Amperdoo was a desolation akin to death.  To many a weary prisoner it proved death itself and so the gate to wider life.  To one man it was purgatory but short removed from hell, and that he came through it unscathed was due to that which he had at first regarded as a misfortune, but which, by shutting him into a world of his own with those he loved, kept his heart sweet and fresh and unassoiled.

In time, indeed, my hearing gradually returned, and long before I left the prison it was quite recovered.  But before it came back the habit of loneliness had grown upon me, and there was little temptation to break through it, and I lived much within myself.

Many the nights I sought my hammock as soon as the daylight faded, and lay there thinking of them all at home.  To open my eyes was to look on a mob of crouching figures by the distant fire, wrangling as it seemed—­for I could not hear them—­over their cards and dice.  But—­close my eyes, and in a moment I was in Jeanne Falla’s great kitchen at Beaumanoir, with Carette perched up on the side of the green-bed, swinging her feet and knitting blue wool, and Aunt Jeanne herself, kneeling in the wide hearth in the glow of the flaming gorse, seeing to her cooking and flashing her merry wisdom at us with twinkling eyes.  Or—­in the glimmer of the dawn, my eyes would open drearily on the rows and rows of hammocks in the long wooden room, every single hammock a stark bundle of misery and suffering.  And I would close them again and draw the blanket tight over my head, and—­we were boy and girl again, splashing barefoot in the warm pools under the Autelets; or—­we were lying in the sunshine in the sweet short herbs of the headlands, with kicking heels and light hair all mixed up with dark, as we laid our heads together and plotted mischiefs; or, side by side, with gleaming brown faces, and free unfettered limbs as white as our thoughts, we slipped through the writhing coils of the Gouliot, and hung panting to the honeycombed rocks while the tide hissed and whispered in the long tresses of the seaweed.

My clearest and dearest recollections were of those earlier days, before any fixed hopes and ideas had brought with them other possibilities.  But I thought too of Jeanne Falla’s party, and of young Torode, and I wondered and wondered what might be happening over there, with me given up for dead and Torode free to work his will so far as he was able.

Some comfort I found in thought of Aunt Jeanne, in whose wisdom I had much faith; and in George Hamon, who knew my hopes and hated Torode; and in my mother and my grandfather and Krok, who would render my love every help she might ask, but were not so much in the way of it as the others.  But, if they all deemed me dead,—­as by this time I feared they must, though, indeed, they had refused to do so before,—­my time might already be past, and that which I cherished as hope might be even now but dead ashes.