“We won’t let them land.”

“You can’t close every door with thirty men, mon gars.”

“One at the Coupee, if they make for Gorey.  Three at Dos d’Ane.  Three at Havre Gosselin.  Half a dozen at the Creux—­”

“Ta-ta!  What about Eperquerie and Dixcart, my boy?  Those are the open doors, and they know it just as well as you do.  They’re not going to climb one by one when they can come all in a heap.  Mon Dieu, non!” she said, shaking her head ominously.  “If they come there’ll be rough work, and the readier we are for it the better.”

Carette’s face had shadowed at this gloomy talk, when she had been hoping that our troubles were over.  And I could find little to reassure her, for it seemed to me more than likely that Aunt Jeanne’s predictions would be fulfilled.

“I’ll go along to Moie de Mouton and keep a look-out,” I said.

“I also,” said Carette, and we went off over the knoll together.

We sat in the short sweet grass of the headland, just as we had sat many a time when we were boy and girl, when life was all as bright as the inside of an ormer shell and we were friends with all the world.

The sun was dropping behind Herm into a dark bank of clouds which lay all along the western sky.  Behind the clouds the heavens seemed ablaze with a mighty conflagration.  Long level shafts of glowing gold streamed through the rifts, like a hot fire through the bars of a grate, and our faces and all the bold Sercq cliffs were dyed red.  The sun himself looked like a fiery clot of blood.  Everything was very still, as with a sense of expectation.

Tintageu, and the Platte, and Guillaumesse, and the gleaming Autelets, and La Grune, and on the other side the great black Gouliot rocks, and Moie Batarde, and the long dark side of Brecqhou all seemed straining with wide anxious eyes to learn what was coming.  There was a dull growl of surf from below, and low harsh croakings and mewings from the gulls down in Port a la Jument.  And we seemed to be all waiting for what should come out of Herm along the red path of the sun.

Carette shivered inside my arm.

“Cold, dearest?” I asked.

“My heart is heavy.  Oh, but I wish it was the day after to-morrow, Phil.”

“It will come.  But we look like having a storm first.  Those black clouds—­”

“God’s storms I do not mind.  It is that black Herm—­Hark!” and we heard the sound of guns again along the wind.  “Do you think they will come here, Phil?”

“I think it quite likely, dear.  But we are forearmed and we fight for our homes.  If they come, they are a beaten crew bent only on mischief.  We shall beat them again.”

“You won’t go and get yourself killed, Phil dear, just when you’ve come back to me?”

“That I won’t.  And when they’ve come and gone—­” and I comforted her with warmer things than words.  And Tintageu, and the black Gouliot rocks, and all the straining headlands seemed to look at us for a moment, and then turned and stared out anxiously at Herm.