row about the bathing course for purposes
of rescue, was, with his craft, apparently off duty.

"How well you swim," said her lover, admiringly, as he greeted the young
girl and noted enviously the drippings from her disfiguring cap that
were privileged to alight upon her dimpled cheeks. He was tempted to put
an arm round the pretty panting figure, but resisted.

"It is my one _passe temps_. I have swam half to Cezambre and back," she
exclaimed proudly, indicating, by a glance over her shoulder, an island
that reared its rocks some two miles distant.

He flushed slightly.

"It is there that I want you to swim--now, when you have rested."

"Too far," she sighed; "we could never get back."

"We should never come back," he announced with determination.

"Valentine? She will think I drown."

"She would prefer to bury you at La Chaumais?"

Leonie laughed.

"Are you ready?" he said, arresting further objections and crushing a
word of endearment that rose to his lips. To be successful he must be
matter-of-fact. Everything now depended on promptness and a cool head.
He pulled a knotted string and lifted from the water a cork belt.

"You must run no risk of fatigue," he said, fitting it to her fragile
form. "Now, let us start. Valentine will soon be on the _qui vive_."

Without demur she accepted his hand and leapt with him from the far side
of the raft.

The sea stretched a sheet of silver under a sky of gauzy opal, shot with
flame from the dozing sun; wind and tide were in their favour. Before
long they had passed from the sight of the shore to the shade of the
giant rock, whose railed summit, dedicated to Chateaubriand, seems to
commune with and command the elements. Cezambre in the distance was as
yet merely an apparent triangle of spikes jutting from mid ocean, but
towards it they plied their way valiantly, two moving human dots, on the
breast of the vast abyss. Once she laughed uproariously to relieve her
happiness, but he checked her.

"We must reserve our forces, my darling, every breath in us. Valentine
will give the alarm directly. She will wait and wait, and then there
will be a hue and cry. It will be a matter of life and death. Do you
understand?"

In the earnestness of his face she read for the first time all that this
adventurous swim would mean for them both.

"If they come," she panted, "you will not leave me, you will not give me
back to them?"

His jaws clenched hard.

"Never!" he vowed