Her silence seemed long, while Uncle George looked at her entreatingly, and she looked at the floor, and seemed lost in thought.

“Yes,” she said at last, and Went towards the door.

“Put on a shawl.  The night is cold,” said Uncle George, and it seemed to me that there was something of a new and gentle right in his tone, something of proprietorship in his manner.

And so we went along the footpaths past La Moinerie and down the zigzag into Port du Moulin, the only bay along that coast into which my mother could possibly have gone by night, and that was why Uncle George had brought him there.

I do not think a word was spoken all the way.  Krok held the lantern for my mother’s feet.  Uncle George walked close behind her, and at times before her, in the descent, and helped her down, and so we came at last to the shingle and crunched over it to the boat.

Krok put down his lantern on a rock, and he and Uncle George got in and pulled out to the lugger which was anchored about twenty yards out.

They came back presently, and lifted out the body and laid it gently on the stones, and Krok brought his lantern.  My mother’s face was very white and pinched as she knelt down beside it, and at first sight she started and looked quickly up at Uncle George as though in doubt or denial.  And presently Uncle George bent down and with his hand lifted the moustache back from the dead man’s mouth, and my mother gazed into the dark face and said quietly, “It is he,” then she seized my grandfather’s arm suddenly and turned away.  They were stumbling over the rough stones when Krok ran after them with the lantern and came back in the dark.

We laid the body in the boat again, and Krok lifted in some great round stones, and we rowed out to the black loom of the lugger.  Uncle George lit his own lantern, and by its dim light Krok set to work preparing my father’s body for its last journey.

Whether he was simply anxious to get done with the business, or whether he felt a gloomy satisfaction in performing these last rites for a man whom he had always hated for his treatment of my mother, I do not know.  But he certainly went about it with a grim earnestness which was not very far removed from enjoyment.

He stripped the mizzen-mast of its sail, and Uncle George said no word against it.  If Krok had required the lugger itself as a coffin he would not have said him nay.

He wrapped the body carefully in the sail, with great smooth stones from the beach, and with some rope and his knife he sewed it all tightly together, and pulled each knot home with a jerk that was meant to be final, and his hairy old face was crumpled into a frown as he worked.

We ran swiftly up Great Russel under the strong west wind, until, by the longer swing of the seas, we knew we were free of the rocks and islands north of Herm.

Then Uncle George turned her nose to the wind, and under the slatting sail, with bared heads, we committed to the seas the body of him who had wrought such mischief upon them and in some of our lives.