uth to mouth,
aroused cries of astonishment and admiration.

Gradually, lights appeared in the Hastings windows. Simon, exhausted
but indomitable, was walking briskly, sustained by a nervous energy
which seemed to be renewed as and when he expended it. And suddenly he
burst out laughing to think--and certainly no thought could have been
more stimulating or better calculated to give a last fillip to his
failing strength--to think that he, Simon Dubosc, a man of the good
old Norman stock, was setting foot in England at the very spot where
William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had landed in the eleventh
century! Hastings! King Harold and his mistress, Edith of the swan's
neck! The great adventure of yore was being reenacted! For the second
time the virgin isle was conquered . . . and conquered by a Norman!

"I believe destiny is favouring me, my Lord Bakefield," he said to
himself.

The new land joined the mainland between Hastings and St. Leonards. It
was intersected by valleys and fissures, bristling with rocks and
fragments of the cliffs, in the midst of which lay, in an
indescribable jumble, the wreckage of demolished piers, fallen
lighthouses, stranded and shattered ships. But Simon saw nothing of
all this. His eyes were too weary to distinguish things save through a
mist.

They reached the shore. What happened next? He was vaguely conscious
that some one was leading him, through streets with broken pavements
and between heaps of ruins, to the hall of a casino, a strange,
dilapidated building, with tottering walls and a gaping roof, but
nevertheless radiant with electric light.

The municipal authorities had assembled here to receive him. Champagne
was drunk. Hymns of rejoicing were sung with religious fervour. A
stirring spectacle and, at the same time, a striking proof of the
national self-control, this celebration improvised in the midst of a
town in ruins. But every one present had the impression that something
of a very great importance had occurred, something so great that it
outweighed the horror of the catastrophe and the consequent mourning:
France and England were united!

France and England were united; and the first man who had walked from
the one country to the other by the path which had risen from the very
depths of the ancient Channel that used to divide them was there, in
their midst. What could they do but honour him? He represented in his
magnificent effort the vitality and the inexhausti