ench and English waters in the
_Josephine_. I could perhaps have slipped away into the island, but that
would in no way have furthered my getting home, rather would it have
fettered me with new and tighter bonds. For in the end I must have boarded
some English ship and been promptly pressed into the service, and that was
by no means what I wanted. It was my own Island of Sercq I longed for, and
all that it held and meant for me.

I saw clearly that if at any time we came to a fight with a British
warship, and were captured, I must become either prisoner of war as a
Frenchman, or pressed man as an Englishman. Neither position held out hope
of a speedy return home, but, of the two, I favoured the first as offering
perhaps the greater chances.

As the weeks passed into months, all of the same dull pattern, I lost heart
at times, thinking of all that might be happening at home.

Sometimes it seemed to me hardly possible that Torode would dare to go on
living at Herm and playing that desperate game of the double flags, while
somewhere one man lived who might turn up at any time and blow him to the
winds. And in pondering the matter, the fact that he had spared that man's
life became a greater puzzle to me than ever. Depressing, too, the thought
that if he did so stop on, it was because he considered the measures he had
taken for his own safety as effective as death itself, and he was
undoubtedly a shrewd and far-thinking man. That meant that my chances of
ever turning up again in Sercq were small indeed. And, on the other hand,
if a wholesome discretion drove him to the point of flitting, I had reason
enough to fear for Carette. He had vowed his son should have her, and both
father and son were men who would stick at nothing to gain their ends.

So my thoughts were black enough. I grew homesick, and heart-sick, and
there were many more in the same condition, and maybe, to themselves, with
equal cause.

Just four months we had been there, when one morning an old-fashioned
20-gun corvette came wallowing in, and an hour later we knew that she had
come to relieve us and we were to sail for home as soon as we were
provisioned. Work went with a will, for every man on board was sick of the
place in spite of the easy living and good faring, and we were at sea
within forty-eight hours. The word between-decks, too, was that Bonaparte
was about to conquer England, and we were hurrying back to take part in the
great invasion. The sp