"But I don't know that we can. I know nothing about boat-building even if I had the tools, and Macro won't turn to it till he has raked through the wreckage, and that will take him about a hundred years. It grows with every storm, you see." "We must make him." "And the tools?" "We must find them." "Two difficult jobs, perhaps impossible ones. You might perhaps prevail on Macro, but even he can do nothing without tools.... But, if I may venture to say so--it is surely early days for you to have discovered the hollowness of life, and to feel ready to spend the rest of it on a sandbank. Life should hold more in it than that for you." She looked meditatively across at him for a moment, then seemed to make up her mind. "It is natural you should wish to know.... I will tell you.... It is a somewhat sorry story, but I think you will understand.... My name told you nothing?" "Nothing--except that it was a very pretty name." "I feared it would. It is natural, I suppose, to imagine that the whole world knows of one's misfortunes. Have you ever heard of the Countess d'Ormont?" "The name is familiar to me in some way," he said, staring at her in surprise at the trend this was taxing. "But I cannot recall----" "And the Comte d'Artois----" "Of course!" he nodded. "Now I remember----" "The Countess d'Ormont was Margaret Drummond, my mother. My father is Charles Philippe, Comte d'Artois, brother of the poor King, Louis, whose head they cut off; and I hate and detest him for his treatment of her.... She is dead, my poor dear one! ... She believed at first that she was properly married to him, and I have no doubt she was--in London. He is a poor thing, but he was very fond of her, for a time.... I was born at Chantilly. It was before his quarrel with the Duc de Bourbon, and we lived in Paris and elsewhere according to his caprice. When my mother learned all the truth, and that in Paris she was not legally his wife, it broke her heart, I think. I never remembered her but as sad and troubled. Except on my account she was not sorry to die, I know. I was in Paris all through the Red times, and saw--oh, mon Dieu,--the horrors of it all!--things I could never forget if I lived to be a thousand.... In London we were all very badly off.... But he liked to have me with him, and poor Mme de Polastron was very good to me, but she was a strange, strange woman.... Her death was a great blow to him ... and a great loss to me. He was really very badly off there, and I did not like the people he had about him,--de Vaudreuil, de Roll, du Theil, and the rest, and I made up my mind to seek my own life elsewhere. And that is about all." "And you have friends in America--relatives perhaps?"