son with care. It
was a bit of a natural rock passage, such as I had often seen on Sercq,
formed, I have been told, by the decay of some softer material between two
masses of rock. It was about eight feet wide, and the roof, some twenty
feet above my head, was formed by the falling together of the sides which
sloped and narrowed somewhat at the entrance. In length, my room was thirty
paces from the iron grating to the opening in the face of the cliff. This
opening also was strongly barred with iron. The floor of the passage broke
off sharply there, and when I worked out a piece of rock from the side
wall, and dropped it through the bars, it seemed to fall straight into the
sea, a good hundred feet below. The left-hand wall stopped a foot beyond
the iron bars, but at the right hand the rock wall ran on for twenty feet
or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the
outlook. I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost
all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril
of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran
through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed it in patches.

By squeezing hard against the bars where they were let into the rock on the
right, I found I could just get a glimpse of the free blue sea rolling and
tossing outside, and by dint of observation and much careful watching I
learned where I was.

For, away out there among the tumbling blue waves, I could just make out a
double-headed rock which the tide never covered, and I recognised it as the
_Grand Amfroque,_ one of our steering points in Great Russel.

So, then, I was in Herm, not four miles away from Brecqhou, and though,
for any benefit the knowledge was to me, I might as well have been in
America itself, it still warmed my heart to think that Carette was there,
and almost within sight but for that wretched wall of rock. If fiery
longing could melt solid rock, that barrier had disappeared in the
twinkling of an eye.

The time passed very slowly with me. I spent most of it against the bars,
peering out at the sea. Once or twice distant boats passed across my narrow
view, and I wondered who were in them. And I thought sadly of the folk in
Peter Port still looking hopefully for the _Swallow_, and following her
possible fortunes, and wishing her good luck--and she and all her crew,
except myself, at the bottom of the sea, as foully murdered as e