ngly. She must have time to
think, but she said tentatively:

"I suppose it's no secret? I can tell any one at all what happened to
your father?" she asked.

"Oh so--sure so!" he said rather eagerly. "Tell every one about it. He
doesn't mind."

Maitre Ranulph deceived but badly. Bold and convincing in all honest
things, he was, as yet, unconvincing in this grave deception. All these
years he had kept silence, enduring what he thought a buried shame;
but that shame had risen from the dead, a living agony. His father had
betrayed the island to the French: if the truth were known to-day they
would hang him for a traitor on the Mont es Pendus. No mercy and scant
shrift would be shown him.

Whatever came, he must drink this bitter cup to the dregs. He could
never betray his own father. He must consume with inward disgust while
Olivier Delagarde shamelessly babbled his monstrous lies to all who
would listen. And he must tell these lies too, conceal, deceive, and
live in hourly fear of discovery. He must sit opposite his father day by
day at table, talk with him, care for him, shrinking inwardly at every
knock at the door lest it should be an officer come to carry the pitiful
traitor off to prison.

And, more than all, he must give up for ever the thought of Guida. Here
was the acid that ate home, the black hopelessness, the machine of fate
clamping his heart. Never again could he rise in the morning with a
song on his lips; never again his happy meditations go lilting with the
clanging blows of the adze and the singing of the saws.

All these things had vanished when he looked into a tent-door on the
Ecrehos. Now, in spite of himself, whenever he thought upon Guida's
face, this other fateful figure, this Medusan head of a traitor, shot in
between.

Since his return his father had not been strong enough to go abroad; but
to-day he meant to walk to the Vier Marchi. At first Ranulph had decided
to go as usual to his ship-yard at St. Aubin's, but at last in
anxious fear he too had come to the Vier Marchi. There was a horrible
fascination in being where his father was, in listening to his
falsehoods, in watching the turns and twists of his gross hypocrisies.

But yet at times he was moved by a strange pity, for Olivier Delagarde
was, in truth, far older than his years: a thin, shuffling, pallid
invalid, with a face of mingled sanctity and viciousness. If the old
man lied, and had not been in prison all these years, he mu