tricand slowly.

"It will make my cousin so happy--so happy," quavered the little
Chevalier. "Will you take snuff with me, monsieur?" He offered his
silver snuff-box to his vagrant countryman. This was a mark of favour he
showed to few.

Detricand bowed, accepted, and took a pinch. "I must be going," he said.

CHAPTER IX

At eight o'clock the next morning, Guida and her fellow-voyagers, bound
for the Ecrehos Rocks, had caught the first ebb of the tide, and with a
fair wind from the sou'-west had skirted the coast, ridden lightly over
the Banc des Violets, and shaped their course nor'-east. Guida kept the
helm all the way, as she had been promised by Ranulph. It was still
more than half tide when they approached the rocks, and with a fair wind
there should be ease in landing.

No more desolate spot might be imagined. To the left, as you faced
towards Jersey, was a long sand-bank. Between the rocks and the
sand-bank shot up a tall, lonely shaft of granite with an evil history.
It had been chosen as the last refuge of safety for the women and
children of a shipwrecked vessel, in the belief that high tide would
not reach them. But the wave rose up maliciously, foot by foot, till
it drowned their cries for ever in the storm. The sand-bank was called
"Ecriviere," and the rock was afterwards known as the "Pierre des
Femmes."

Other rocks less prominent, but no less treacherous, flanked it--the
Noir Sabloniere and the Grande Galere. To the right of the main island
were a group of others, all reef and shingle, intersected by treacherous
channels; in calm lapped by water with the colours of a prism of
crystal, in storm by a leaden surf and flying foam. These were known as
the Colombiere, the Grosse Tete, Tas de Pois, and the Marmotiers; each
with its retinue of sunken reefs and needles of granitic gneiss lying
low in menace. Happy the sailor caught in a storm and making for the
shelter the little curves in the island afford, who escapes a twist
of the current, a sweep of the tide, and the impaling fingers of the
submarine palisades.

Beyond these rocks lay Maitre Ile, all gneiss and shingle, a desert in
the sea. The holy men of the early Church, beholding it from the shore
of Normandy, had marked it for a refuge from the storms of war and the
follies of the world. So it came to pass, for the honour of God and the
Virgin Mary, the Abbe of Val Richer builded a priory there: and there
now lie in peace the bones of the