nches!"

He drew himself up firmly, for a great resolve was made. His path
was clear. It was a fair fight, he thought; the odds were not so much
against him after all, for his birth was as good as Philip d'Avranche's,
his energy was greater, and he was as capable and as clever in his own
way.

He walked quickly down the shingle towards the wreck on the other side
of the islet. As he passed the hut where the sick man lay, he heard a
querulous voice. It was not that of the Reverend Lorenzo Dow.

Where had he heard that voice before? A shiver of fear ran through him.
Every sense and emotion in him was arrested. His life seemed to reel
backward. Curtain after curtain of the past unfolded.

He hurried to the door of the hut and looked in.

A man with long white hair and straggling grey beard turned to him a
haggard face, on which were written suffering, outlawry, and evil.

"Great God--my father!" Ranulph said.

He drew back slowly like a man who gazes upon some horrible fascinating
thing, and then turned heavily towards the sea, his face set, his senses
paralysed.

"My father not dead! My father--the traitor!" he groaned.

CHAPTER XII

Philip d'Avranche sauntered slowly through the Vier Marchi, nodding
right and left to people who greeted him. It was Saturday and market day
in Jersey. The square was crowded with people. All was a cheerful
babel; there was movement, colour everywhere. Here were the high and
the humble, hardi vlon and hardi biaou--the ugly and the beautiful,
the dwarfed and the tall, the dandy and the dowdy, the miser and the
spendthrift; young ladies gay in silks, laces, and scarfs from Spain,
and gentlemen with powdered wigs from Paris; sailors with red tunics
from the Mediterranean, and fishermen with blue and purple blouses from
Brazil; man-o'-war's-men with Greek petticoats, Turkish fezzes, and
Portuguese espadras. Jersey housewives, in bedgones and white caps, with
molleton dresses rolled up to the knees, pushed their way through the
crowd, jars of black butter, or jugs of cinnamon brandy on their heads.
From La Pyramide--the hospitable base of the statue of King George
II--fishwives called the merits of their conger-eels and ormers; and
the clatter of a thousand sabots made the Vier Marchi sound like a
ship-builder's yard.

In this square Philip had loitered and played as a child. Down there,
leaning against a pillar of the Corn Market piazza was Elie Mattingley,
the grizzly-haired