As the Earl of Marlborough spoke, doubtless through the information he was regularly supplied with from England, so things occurred. Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the English admiral, did send the _Pembroke_ and the _Tartar_ to the Gulf of Narbonne with a view not only to supply the Camisards with money and arms and ammunition, but also to land men to assist them. But, when they arrived off the coast and made signals all night, there were none on shore who could comprehend them, for the simple reason that the French Protestant who had been sent by the Earl of Nottingham from London with the key to these signals, had been arrested before he could reach Cette, and his body was at the very time lying broken to pieces and mutilated on the wheel at Aigues-Mortes. Later, but unhappily much later, the peace that was patched up between Louis and his Protestant subjects came about not by the force of arms but by the humanity of a French general, De Villars. But neither the Comtesse de Valorme nor the Earl of Marlborough could look into the glass of Time or tell what seeds should grow and what should not, and, consequently, if the former did not set out with Sylvia with her heart thoroughly at ease, at least that heart was full of hope. Hope that those of her faith might at last be free from the miseries they had endured so long; from the burnings, the wheels and dungeons, the gallows formed by their own fruit trees, the deaths from starvation of their old parents and helpless children, the galleys and the forced exile to stranger lands. And also, she set out with one other great, one supreme hope in her heart for the immediate future. The hope, coupled with a prayer that she and Sylvia might be in time to save Bevill from the fate that still must threaten him, if already the worst had not befallen--the prayer that, at last, he and Sylvia might be happy. "For," she told herself again as she had done many times before, "they love each other. Let my happiness in this world be to see their happiness; my greatest hope never to lose hope that they may yet be united, since, for me, there can never be any other," and, as these thoughts passed through her mind, the tears fell from her eyes. CHAPTER XXXIV.