ed the prow off again, springing in as his comrade backed her into
deep water. Already the glow in the west had vanished, the storm-cloud
was half up the heavens, and a thick blackness had gathered over the
ocean. As I turned to watch the vanishing boat a keen wet blast flapped
in my face, and the air was filled with the high piping of the wind and
with the deep thunder of the sea.

And thus it was that, on a wild evening in the early spring of the year
1805, I, Louis de Laval, being in the twenty-first year of my age,
returned, after an exile of thirteen years, to the country of which my
family had for many centuries been the ornament and support. She had
treated us badly, this country; she had repaid our services by insult,
exile, and confiscation. But all that was forgotten as I, the only de
Laval of the new generation, dropped upon my knees upon her sacred soil,
and, with the strong smell of the seaweed in my nostrils, pressed my
lips upon the wet and pringling gravel.

CHAPTER II

THE SALT-MARSH

When a man has reached his mature age he can rest at that point of
vantage, and cast his eyes back at the long road along which he has
travelled, lying with its gleams of sunshine and its stretches of shadow
in the valley behind him. He knows then its whence and its whither, and
the twists and bends which were so full of promise or of menace as he
approached them lie exposed and open to his gaze. So plain is it all
that he can scarce remember how dark it may have seemed to him, or how
long he once hesitated at the cross roads. Thus when he tries to recall
each stage of the journey he does so with the knowledge of its end, and
can no longer make it clear, even to himself, how it may have seemed to
him at the time. And yet, in spite of the strain of years, and the many
passages which have befallen me since, there is no time of my life which
comes back so very clearly as that gusty evening, and to this day I
cannot feel the briny wholesome whiff of the seaweed without being
carried back, with that intimate feeling of reality which only the sense
of smell can confer, to the wet shingle of the French beach.

When I had risen from my knees, the first thing that I did was to put my
purse into the inner pocket of my coat. I had taken it out in order to
give a gold piece to the sailor who had handed me ashore, though I have
little doubt that the fellow was both wealthier and of more assured
prospects than myself