the guidance of the sun, it
needs a certain amount of familiarity with the district to know exactly
where one will come out.

The small boy stolidly led the way past Beaumanoir, and Carette wailed like
a lost soul alongside. Jeanne Falla looked out as they passed and called
out to know what was happening.

"This wicked man is making Phil show him the way to the Boutiques," cried
Carette, and the wicked man chuckled, and so did Jeanne Falla.

They passed the cottages at La Vauroque. The women and children crowded the
doors.

"What is it then, Carette?" they cried. "Where is he taking him?"

"He is making him show him the way to the Boutiques," cried Carette,
crumpling her pretty face into hideous grimaces by way of explanation.

"Oh, my good!" cried the women, and the procession passed on along the road
that led past Dos d'Ane. The steamy haze lay thicker here. The wind drove
it past in slow coils, but its skirts seemed to cling to the heather and
bracken as though reluctant to loose its hold on the Island.

They passed down a rough rock path with ragged yellow sides, and stood
suddenly looking out, as it seemed, on death.

In front and all around--a fathomless void of mist, which curled slowly
past in thin white whorls. The only solid thing--the raw yellow path on
which they stood. It stretched precariously out into the void and seemed to
rest on nothing. From somewhere down below came the hoarse low growl of sea
on rock. Otherwise the stillness of death.--The Coupee!

Sorely trying to stranger nerves at best of times was that wonderful
narrow bone of a neck which joins Little Sercq to Sercq,--six hundred feet
long, three hundred feet high, four feet wide at its widest at that time,
and in places less, and with nothing between the crumbling edges of the
path and the growling death below but ragged falls of rock, almost sheer on
the one side and little better on the other. On a clear day the
unaccustomed eye swam with the welter of the surf below on both sides at
once; the unaccustomed brain reeled at thought of so precarious a passage;
and the unaccustomed body, unless tenanted by a fool, or possessed of
nerves beyond the ordinary or of no nerves at all, turned as a rule at the
sight and thanked God for the feel of solid rock behind, or else went
humbly down on hands and knees and so crossed in safety with lowered crest.

To the eyes of the rat-faced man the path seemed but a wavering line in the
wavering mist