“Surely!  Until my father and Martin came alone telling us the rest were gone.  It was sore news indeed.”

“Unless they saw them lying dead they may still live.  You have thought them dead.  But, dear, Helier was with me in the prison in England.  He came there sorely wounded, and I helped to nurse him back to life.  We escaped together and got home together—­” Her hands had clasped in her excitement, and the white glimmer of her face was lifted hopefully to mine, and I hurried on to crush her hope before it grew of size to die hard.

“We got home together that morning they carried you off.  He went to Aunt Jeanne’s and I went home.  When Krok burst in with the news about you, I hurried across to Brecqhou.  On the shore of the bay was a boat, and in it Helier lay dead with a bullet through his head.”

“Oh, Phil!” in a voice of anguish, for Helier had been her favourite....  “And who—?”

“Those who took you without doubt.”

“Ah, the wretches!  I wish—­” And I was of the same mind.

“I could do nothing, for he was dead.  So I took his boat and followed you to Herm.  Those who followed me to Brecqhou buried him there.  But if he had not come I could not have got to Herm before they set their watch boats.  So he helped, you see, though he did not know it.”

“My poor Helier!...  They had muffled my head in a cloak so that I could neither hear nor see.  I had just gone outside—­”

“Your father and Martin were in a great state about you, but I could not wait to explain.  Anything I could have said would only have added to their anxiety, and that was not as great as my own, for I had my own fears of what had happened and they knew nothing.”

“Yes, yes.  You could have done no other,” and she fell silent for a time, refitting her thoughts of Helier, no doubt.

So far, the most striking things in our rock parlour had been the silence and the darkness, but before long we had noise and to spare.

First, a low harsh growling from the tunnel by which we had entered, and that was the returning tide churning among the shingle and boulders in the rock channels outside.  Then it grew into a roar which rose and fell as the long western waves plunged into the Boutiques, and swelled and foamed along its echoing sides, and then sank back with a long weltering sob, and rose again higher than before, and knew no rest.  We could hear it all so clearly that none could doubt the existence of passages between the two caves.

We sat and listened to it, and ate at times, but could not talk much for the uproar.  But for me it was enough to sit with Carette inside my arm and close against my heart, and there was something in that long swelling roar and sighing sob which, after a while, set weights on the eyelids and the senses and disposed one to sleep.  For a time we counted the coming of the larger wave, and then the countings grew confused and we fell asleep.