Anne smiled, recognising this for a jest, not to be taken seriously. He studied his friend, whose bandaged head was bare in the windy moonlight. "I like your hair," he observed thoughtfully. "But already--is it rude of me to say so?--there are some grey hairs there . . . only a few." He laid a small finger on La Vireville's temple. "I saw them when you were asleep in the cave." "I have so many cares," sighed the Chouan. "You have seen, Anne, what a quantity of people I have to look after in Brittany. Then there is my mother--and, lately, a certain small boy. . . . And, by the way, it is time that small boy went to bed. We shall not reach St. Helier till morning." He went off to see what accommodation had been prepared for the child. When he returned, he found Anne giving an account of his adventures to the interested Gosset, who was standing looking down at him with his hands on his hips. "And now," finished Anne, "M. le Chevalier is going to take me to Mme. de la Vireville in Jersey, and then I shall go home to my Grandpapa in London." "You seem to have had a stirring time, by gad!" commented the sailor. "But I did not know that you had a wife, La Vireville! Since when are you married, may I ask, and who is the fortunate lady?" The Frenchman frowned. "You are misinformed," he said shortly. "I have never had a wife. It is my mother to whom I am taking him." "I beg your pardon!" exclaimed Gosset, struck by the sudden change in his face, and La Vireville turned and walked away. CHAPTER XIV CÆSAREA THE GREEN (1) The port of St. Helier, reached at last after such vicissitudes of seafaring, was ringing with Jersey-French and English, and here and there with the genuine tongue of Gaul, for the place was full of Royalist refugees. As the tall Frenchman with the bandaged head, holding by the hand the little boy in the dishevelled English clothes, made his way between fishermen, loiterers, and an occasional man-of-war's man from the English frigate in the roads, he nodded to an acquaintance or two, not staying, however, to satisfy the curiosity of any. It happened that their road from the harbour led through some stalls of market produce. Anne was chattering gaily as they passed between heaps of apples and onions, when the course of his legs was suddenly checked, and, through surprise, that of his tongue also, by the fact that his conductor had stopped. He looked up, and followed the direction of his friend's eyes to where, by a stall a little farther on, two women had paused. The one was an upstanding Jersey peasant girl with a basket on her arm, the other a little elderly lady in black. At the moment one of her diminutive hands was resting on a robust cabbage, where it looked like a belated butterfly. "No, this is larger than I require," she was saying, in the prettiest broken English.