And Fortuné raised his throbbing head from the gunwale to look for her--but he was quite alone in the boat, and the boat was alone, motionless, in the midst of a shining sea. How the sun stared at him--and yet he was so cold! His head fell back again inert, and he returned once more to the vision of that tragic line of fallen, writhing figures, an ineffaceable glimpse of which his senses had caught and recorded as he leapt the wall. Later still, as daylight faded, the little boat, lifting sideways with every long shoreward wave, her sails racketing madly about, drifted nearer and nearer to the iron rocks of Houat, where the surf was always pounding. The wished-for wind had sprung up just at sunset, but the helmsman, lying face upwards in the sternsheets, much as François the fisherman had once lain, was in no condition to utilise it, or even to avert the disaster to which it was hurrying him. * * * * * Author's Note.--It is a matter of historical fact that one émigré did escape shooting at Quiberon by throwing his gold to the firing-party, exactly as described. CHAPTER XXXV MR. TOLLEMACHE AS A LINGUIST (1) The full-rigged ship, in oils, embedded in a solid sea of the same medium resembling a newly ploughed ultramarine field, which hung over the chest of drawers in the Bishop's bedroom (he having taken the little house furnished, and feeling, with his fine courtesy, that he had no right to change the place of anything therein), perplexed La Vireville not at all. Almost his last memory had been of the sea. There was, too, a stuffed trout in a glass case which might also, with a little difference, have been a denizen of the deep. . . . But his mind, still, after ten days' care, somewhat confused, was not at all cleared by lying and gazing, as he often did, at the little triptych of the Assumption which the Bishop had succeeded in bringing away from his private chapel in France, and which hung not far from the other painting. La Vireville could not have told why, but the triptych seemed to him, as it did to the Grand Vicar, incongruous with the stuffed trout. He used to speculate how it got there.