Carterette saw Ranulph little oftener than did Guida, but she knew what he was doing, being anxious to know, and every one's business being every one else's business in Jersey. In the same way Ranulph knew of Guida. What Carterette was doing Ranulph was not concerned to know, and so knew little; and Guida knew and thought little of how Ranulph fared: which was part of the selfishness of love. But one day Carterette received a letter from France which excited her greatly, and sent her off hot-foot to Guida. In the same hour Ranulph heard a piece of hateful gossip which made him fell to the ground the man who told him, and sent him with white face, and sick, yet indignant heart, to the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison. CHAPTER XXV Guida was sitting on the veille reading an old London paper she had bought of the mate of the packet from Southampton. One page contained an account of the execution of Louis XVI; another reported the fight between the English thirty-six gun frigate Araminta and the French Niobe. The engagement had been desperate, the valiant Araminta having been fought, not alone against odds as to her enemy, but against the irresistible perils of a coast upon which the Admiralty charts gave cruelly imperfect information. To the Admiralty we owed the fact, the journal urged, that the Araminta was now at the bottom of the sea, and its young commander confined in a French fortress, his brave and distinguished services lost to the country. Nor had the government yet sought to lessen the injury by arranging a cartel for the release of the unfortunate commander. The Araminta! To Guida the letters of the word seemed to stand out from the paper like shining hieroglyphs on a misty grey curtain. The rest of the page was resolved into a filmy floating substance, no more tangible than the ashy skeleton on which writing still lives when the paper itself has been eaten by flame, and the flame swallowed by the air. Araminta--this was all her eyes saw, that familiar name in the flaring handwriting of the Genius of Life, who had scrawled her destiny in that one word. Slowly the monstrous ciphers faded from the grey hemisphere of space, and she saw again the newspaper in her trembling fingers, the kitchen into which the sunlight streamed from the open window, the dog Biribi basking in the doorway. That living quiet which descends upon a house when the midday meal and work are done came suddenly home to her, in contrast to the turmoil in her mind and being.