Loudly he called out; only the sea answered. Now were the clinging particles at his waist; he lifted my lady higher; clear of them! Once more raised his voice--this time not in vain! "_Mon capitaine_! Where are you?" "Here!" "We don't see you." "You won't soon, unless--" The end of a line struck the sand. The night had almost passed; its last black hour, like a pall, lay over the sea, where, far from the Mount, a ship swayed and tossed. In the narrow confines of her master's cabin, the faint glimmering of a lamp revealed a man bending over a paper, yellow and worn; the lines so faint and delicate, they seemed almost to escape him! "How strange, after all these years, the sight of your handwriting!--and now, to be writing you! Yet is it meet--to say farewell! For that which you have heard, _mon ami_, is true. I am going to die. You say, you heard I was not well; I answer what really you heard; the question, _mon ami_, beneath your words! ... And, dying, it is well with me. I have wronged no soul on earth--except you, my friend, and you forgive me.... I had hoped the years would efface that old memory. You say they have not.... It is wise you are going away." The reader paused; listened to the sea; the moaning and sighing, like voices on the wings of the storm. "You speak in your letter about 'trickery'--used to estrange us! Think no more of it, I beg you. What is past, is gone--as I, part of that past, when we were boy and girl together--soon shall be. And come not near the Mount. There can be no meeting for us on earth. I send you my adieu from afar.... It is only a shadow that speaks ... _mon ami_." CHAPTER XXXIV SOME TIME LATER The little Norman isle, home of Pierre Laroche, so wild and bleak-looking many months of the year, resembles a flowering garden in the spring; then, its lap full of buds and blossoms, smiling, redolent, it lifts itself from the broad bosom of the deep. And all the light embellishments of the golden time it sets forth daintily; fringing the black cliffs with clusters of sea campion, white and frothy as the spray, trailing green ivy from precipitous heights to the verge of the wooing waters, whose waves seem to creep up timorously, peep into the many caves, bright with sea-anemones, and retreat quickly, as awed by a sudden glimpse of fairyland. Near the entrance of one of these magical chambers, abloom with strange, scentless flowers, sat, a certain afternoon in April, a man and a woman, who, looking out over the blue sea, conversed in desultory fashion. "From what your father tells me, Mistress Nanette," the man, an aged priest, was speaking, "the Seigneur Desaurac should be here to-day?" "My father had a letter from him a few days ago to that effect," answered the young woman somewhat shortly.