ite invisible to him. He tripped and stumbled at
times on tangled roots of gorse and bracken, but she kept on swiftly and
unerringly, as though the night were light about her.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked, as they crept past the miners'
cottages on the cliff above Rouge Terrier.

"To Breniere.... To L'Etat.... Bernel went on to find a boat."

And presently they were out on the bald cliff-head, and slipping and
sliding down it till they came to the ledge, below which Breniere
spreads out on the water like a giant's hand.

Between her panting breaths Nance whistled a low soft note like the pipe
of a sea-bird. A like sound came softly up from below, and slipping and
stumbling again, they were on the beach among mighty boulders girt with
dripping sea-weed.

Another low pipe out of the darkness, and they had found the boat and
tumbled into it, wet and bruised, and breathless.

"Dieu merci!" said Bernel, and pulled lustily out to sea.

The swirl of the tide caught them as they cleared Breniere Point, and
Gard crawled forward to take an oar. Nance did the same, and so set
Bernel free to scull and steer, the arrangement which dire experience
has taught the Sark men as best adapted to their rock-strewn waters and
racing currents.

Gard's mind was in a tumult of revolt, but he sensibly drove his
feelings through his muscles to the blade of his oar, and said nothing.
Nance and Bernel were not likely to have gone to these lengths without
what seemed to them sufficient reason.

And he remembered Nance's trembling arm on the Coupee, and her agonies
of fear on his account, and so came by degrees to a certain acceptance
of their view of matters, and therewith a feeling of gratitude for their
labours and risks on his behalf. For he did not doubt that, should the
self-appointed administrators of justice learn who had baulked them of
their prey, they would wreak upon them some of the vengeance they had
intended for himself.

He saw that it was no light matter these two had undertaken, and as he
thought it over, and told the black welter under his oar what he thought
of these wild and hot-headed Sark men, his gratitude grew.

The thin orange sickle of a moon rose at last, high by reason of the
mists banked thick along the horizon, and afforded them a welcome
glimmer of light--barely a glimmer indeed, rather a mere thinning of the
clinging darkness, but enough for Bernel's tutored eye.

He took them in a cautious circu