“Ah!  Torode of Herm!  Yes, he is a clever man is Torode.  But he won’t take you, mon gars.  He picks his own, and there is not an Island man among them.”

The first thing I saw when I entered the house was Carette, busy at one of the bunks in the dimness at the far end of the room.  She looked round, and then straightened up in surprise.

“Why, Phil?  What are you doing here?  One moment”—­and I saw that she was tying a bandage round the arm of the man in the bunk.  His eyes caught the light from the windows and gleamed savagely at me under his rumpled black hair.  A similar face looked out from an adjoining bunk.  When she had finished she came quickly across to me.

“Measles again?” I said, remembering my former visit.

“Yes, measles,” she said, with the colour in her face and questions in her eyes.

“I came to see your father, and if I was in luck, yourself also, Carette.”

“He is sleeping,” she said, with a glance towards a side room.  “He was anxious about these two, and he would take the night watch.  They are feverish, you see.”

“I will wait.”

“He won’t be long.  He never takes much sleep.  What do you want to—­” and then some sudden thought sent a flush of colour into her face and a quick enquiry into her eyes, and she stopped short and stood looking at me.

“It’s this, Carette—­” and then the door of the side room opened quietly and Jean Le Marchant came out, looking at us with much surprise.

He was very little changed since I had seen him last.  It was the same keen, handsome face, with its long white moustache and cold dark eyes, somewhat tired at the moment with their night duties.

“And this is—?” he asked suavely, as I bowed.

“It is Phil Carre, of Belfontaine, father,” said Carette quickly.  “He has come to see you.”

“Very kind of Monsieur Carre.  It is not after my health you came to enquire, monsieur?”

“No, sir.  It is this.  I have decided to go privateering, and I want to go with the best man.  I am told Torode of Herm is the best, and that you can tell me more about him than anyone else.”

“Ah—­Torode!  Yes, he is a very clever man is Torode—­a clever man, and very successful.  And privateering is undoubtedly the game nowadays.  Honest free-trading isn’t in it compared with the privateering, though even that isn’t what it was, they say.  Like everything else, it is overdone, and many mouths make scant faring.  And so you want to go out with Torode?” he asked musingly.

“That is my idea.  You see, monsieur, I have spent nearly four years in the trading to the Indies, and I am about as well off as when I started—­except in experience.  Now I want to make something—­all I can, and as quickly as I can.  And,” I said, plunging headlong at my chief object in coming, “my reasons stand there,” and I pointed to Carette, who jumped at the suddenness of it, and coloured finely, and bit her lip, and sped away on some household duty which she had not thought of till that moment.