"Then I could put my big shell inside," murmured Anne drowsily. "M. le Chevalier said it came from . . . came from. . . ." He ceased suddenly; he was asleep. Conscience-stricken at last, Mr. Elphinstone rang the bell for Elspeth, and was left by the fire to reflect on the inexhaustible mercy of Heaven, and on the debt that he owed to a man away in Jersey, whom he scarcely knew, whom he could not even thank--a debt that in any case, so far as he could see, must ever go unpaid, for it was unpayable. CHAPTER XVI THE AGENT DE LA CORRESPONDANCE (1) It was not until the _Seaflower's_ boat was actually pulling off from the shore, and his feet were sunk in the wet sand of Porhoët Bay, that Fortuné de la Vireville realised how much more serious than he had imagined might prove the results of the ridiculous accident which had befallen him a few hours previously at St. Helier. Embarking, according to arrangement with the Prince de Bouillon, on the lugger _Seaflower_ with a view to being landed, not at Kerdronan as usual, but at Porhoët, where Grain d'Orge was to meet him, he had had the misfortune to receive upon his left foot the full weight of a refractory water-cask of considerable size, which, escaping from the hands of a clumsy sailor, had rolled vehemently down a gang-plank upon him before he could get out of its way. It is true that when he had finished swearing he had found the episode rather ludicrous, and had laughed at himself for his ill-luck, and that on board the lugger, slipping along with an easy evening breeze from Jersey, the damaged foot, though it had sufficiently pained, had not greatly incommoded him. But here, at midnight, alone on the hostile coast of France, he knew for the first time that he was indeed disabled, and that he could not fully rely on that vigorous body of his which for thirty odd years had seldom failed to respond to the often exorbitant demands that he made upon it. It was not at all a pleasant thought, and, standing there at the water's edge, La Vireville uttered a final and more fervent malediction upon the water-cask.