to the
fitness of my intention. It was a much larger house than any I had ever
been in, and there was a straightness and primness about it which somehow
did not suggest any very warm welcome to a young sailorman, whose pride in
his first appointment and in the spreading of his wings for his first
flight underwent sudden shrinkage.

It took me a good half-hour's tramping to and fro, past the house and back
again, eyeing it carefully each time as though I was trying to discover the
best way to break into it, to screw my courage up to the point. There were
two windows on each side of the door and two rows of five above, fourteen
in all, and every window had its little curtains rigged up exactly alike
to a hair's-breadth. If any one of them had been an inch awry I should have
known it, and would have felt less of an intruder.

I had not seen Carette for over six months, and the last time she was home
most of my time, when we met, had been spent in discovering and puzzling
over the changes that had come over her. These ran chiefly towards a
sobriety of behaviour which was not natural to her, and which seemed to me
assumed for my special benefit and tantalisation, and I was expecting every
minute to see the sober cloak cast aside and the laughing Carette of
earlier days dance out into the sunshine of our old camaraderie.

Aunt Jeanne Falla's twinkling eyes furthered the hope. But it was not
realised. Carette unbent, indeed, and we were good friends as ever, but
there was always about her that new cloak of staidness and ladylike polish
which became her prettily enough indeed, but which I could very well have
done without. For, you see, in all our doings hitherto, she had always
looked up to me as leader, even when she twirled my boyish strength about
her finger and made me do her will. And now, though I was bigger and
stronger than ever, she had, in some ways, gone beyond me. She was, in
fact, seeing the world, such as it was in Guernsey in those days, and it
made me feel more than ever how small a place Sercq was, and more than ever
determined to see the world also.

I warped myself up to Miss Mauger's green front door at last and gave a
valiant rap of the knocker, and hung on to it by sheer force of will to
keep myself from running away when I had done it. And when a maid in a prim
white cap opened the door, I had lost my tongue, and stood staring at her
till she smiled encouragingly, as though she thought I might have com