hing-boat without even the necessity of laying hand on
sheet or tiller, when, at last, he had time to think, he found that the
ability to do so was no longer his. For Fortune, when she lifts up or
casts down, usually numbs the understanding at the first turn of
her wheel, sending her victim staggering on his way a mere machine,
astonishingly alive to the necessity of the immediate moment, careful of
the next step, but capable of looking neither forward nor backward with
an understanding eye.

The waning moon came up at last, behind a distant line of trees on the
Charente side, lighting up with a silver lining the towering clouds
of the storm, which was still travelling eastward, leaving in its wake
battered vines and ruined crops, searing the face of the land as with
a hot iron. Loo lifted his head and looked round him. The owner of the
boat was at the tiller, while his assistant sat amidships, his elbows on
his knees, looking ahead with dreamy eyes. Close to Barebone, crouching
from the wind which blew cold from the Atlantic, was Dormer Colville,
affably silent. If Loo turned to glance at him he looked away, but
when his back was turned Loo was conscious of watching eyes, full of
sympathy, almost uncomfortably quick to perceive the inward working of
another's mind, and suit his own thereto.

Thus the boat plunged out toward the sea and the flickering lights
that mark the channel, tacking right across to that spit of land lying
between the Gironde and the broad Atlantic, where grows a wine without
match in all the world. Thus Loo Barebone turned his back on the ship
which had been his home so long and set out into a new world; a new and
unknown life, with the Marquis de Gemosac's ringing words buzzing in his
brain yet; with the warm touch of Juliette's lips burning still upon his
hand.

"You are the grandson of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette! You are the
Last Hope of France!"

And he remembered the lights and shadows on Juliette's hair as he looked
down upon her bent head.

Colville was talking to the "patron" now. He knew the coast, it seemed,
and, somewhere or other, had learnt enough of such matters of local
seafaring interest as to set the fisherman at his ease and make him
talk.

They were arranging where to land, and Colville was describing the exact
whereabouts of a little jetty used for bathing purposes, which ran out
from the sandy shore, quite near to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's house, in
the pine-tree