“That was too late,” said Peyrol, very positively. “You had to come back here for very shame; and now you have come, you don’t look very happy.” “Never mind my looks, gunner. I have made up my mind.” A ferocious, not unpleasing thought flashed through Peyrol’s mind. It was that this intruder on the Escampobar sinister solitude in which he, Peyrol, kept order, was under a delusion. Mind! Pah! His mind had nothing to do with his return. He had returned because, in Catherine’s words, “death had made a sign to him.” Meantime, Lieutenant Réal raised his hat to wipe his moist brow. “I made up my mind to play the part of dispatch-bearer. As you have said yourself, Peyrol, one could not bribe a man--I mean an honest man--so you will have to find the vessel and leave the rest to me. In two or three days.... You are under a moral obligation to let me have your tartane.” Peyrol did not answer. He was thinking that Réal had got his sign, but whether it meant death from starvation or disease on board an English prison hulk, or in some other way, it was impossible to say. This naval officer was not a man he could trust; to whom he could, for instance, tell the story of his prisoner and what he had done with him. Indeed, the story was altogether incredible. The Englishman commanding that corvette had no visible, conceivable or probable reason for sending a boat ashore to the cove of all places in the world. Peyrol himself could hardly believe that it had happened. And he thought: “If I were to tell that lieutenant he would only think that I was an old scoundrel who had been in treasonable communication with the English for God knows how long. No words of mine could persuade him that this was as unforeseen to me as the moon falling from the sky.” “I wonder,” he burst out, but not very loud, “what made you keep on coming back here time after time!” Réal leaned his back against the wall and folded his arms in the familiar attitude of their leisurely talks. “Ennui, Peyrol,” he said in a far-away tone. “Confounded boredom.” Peyrol also, as if unable to resist the force of example, assumed the same attitude, and said: “You seem to be a man that makes no friends.” “True, Peyrol. I think I am that sort of man.” “What, no friends at all? Not even a little friend of any sort?” Lieutenant Réal leaned the back of his head against the wall and made no answer. Peyrol got on his legs. “Oh then, it wouldn’t matter to anybody if you were to disappear for years in an English hulk. And so if I were to give you my tartane you would go?” “Yes, I would go this moment.”