now.

"You hear that water running to the sea?" he said solemnly. "You tried
to kill and drown me to-night. You've heard how when one man has drowned
another an invisible stream follows the murderer wherever he goes, and
he hears it, hour after hour, month after month, year after year, until
suddenly one day it comes on him in a huge flood, and he is found,
whether in the road, or in his bed, or at the table, or in the field,
drowned, and dead?"

The old man shivered violently.

"You know Manon Moignard the witch? Well, if you don't do what I
say--and I shall find out, mind you--she shall bewitch the flood on
you. Be still ... listen! That's the sound you'll hear every day of your
life, if you break the promise you've got to make to me now."

He spoke the promise with ghostly deliberation, and the old man, all
the desperado gone out of him, repeated it in a husky voice. Whereupon
Detricand led him into the garden, saw him safe out on the road and
watched him disappear. Then rubbing his fingers, as though to rid them
of pollution, with an exclamation of disgust he went back to the house.

By another evening--that is, at the hour when Guida arrived home after
her secret marriage with Philip d'Avranche--he saw the lights of the
army of de la Rochejaquelein in the valley of the Vendee.

CHAPTER XVI

The night and morning after Guida's marriage came and went. The day drew
on to the hour fixed for the going of the Narcissus. Guida had worked
all forenoon with a feverish unrest, not trusting herself, though the
temptation was sore, to go where she might see Philip's vessel lying in
the tide-way. She had resolved that only at the moment fixed for sailing
would she go to the shore; yet from her kitchen door she could see a
wide acreage of blue water and a perfect sky; and out there was Noirmont
Point, round which her husband's ship would go, and be lost to her
vision thereafter.

The day wore on. She got her grandfather's dinner, saw him bestowed in
the great arm-chair for his afternoon sleep, and, when her household
work was done, settled herself at the spinning wheel.

The old man loved to have her spin and sing as he drowsed. To-day his
eyes had followed her everywhere. He could not have told why it was, but
somehow all at once he seemed to deeply realise her--her beauty, the joy
of this innocent living intelligence moving through his home. She had
always been necessary to him, but he had taken her presence as