She murmured: “I should love to thank you; but I do not know how. I owe too much to pay the debt.” He said to her: “Smile, lady with the green eyes, and look at me.” She looked at him and smiled. “You’ve paid the debt,” he said. At a quarter to three the music of the bells began again and the big bell of the cathedral came droning round the angle of the cliffs. “It really is quite natural; and the phenomenon is well known all through the district,” Ralph explained. “When the wind blows from the north-east, that is to say from Clermont-Ferrand, the acoustic qualities of the country cause a strong current of air to carry all these sounds by a compulsory route which winds among the mountains and ends at the surface of the lake. It is inevitable; it is mathematical. The bells of all the churches of Clermont-Ferrand and the big bell of its cathedral cannot do anything else but come and ring here as they are doing at the moment.” She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It is not so. Your explanation does not satisfy me.” “Have you another?” “The true one.” “What is it?” “I firmly believe that it is you who bring the sound of these bells here to revive all my impressions as a child.” “I’m omnipotent, then?” “You’re omnipotent,” she said in a tone of profound conviction. “And I’m omniscient also,” said Ralph. “Here, at this very hour, fifteen years ago, you slept.” “What do you mean?” “That your eyes are heavy with sleep since your life of fifteen years ago is being lived again.” She did not try to oppose his wish and stretched herself out in the hammock. Ralph kept watch for a while at the mouth of the grotto. Then, having looked at his watch, his face clouded with annoyance. A quarter past three—and the Marquess de Talencay had not come. “But after all—after all—it isn’t of any importance,” he said to himself. But it was of importance; and well he knew it. There are situations in which everything is of importance. He went back into the grotto and gazed at the girl, who was sleeping under his protection, and wished once more to apostrophize her and thank her for her trust in him. But he could not. A growing anxiety was invading him. He crossed the little beach and discovered that the boat, the bow of which he had drawn up on to the beach, was now floating two or three yards from the edge of it. He had to draw it in with a pole, and then he made a second discovery, which was that the boat, which, during their passage across the lake, had contained two or three inches of water, now contained twenty or thirty. He succeeded in turning it upside down on the beach. “Goodness! What a miracle it was we didn’t go to the bottom!” he thought to himself. It was not a matter of an ordinary crack, easy to stop up, but of a whole plank rotted, of a plank also which had been recently inserted in the bottom of the boat and only fastened by four nails.