"Never! You two? I wonder you came back alive!"

"On the slack it's not so bad, and at half ebb."

"And what is there to see when you get there?"

"Oh, just rocks, and puffins and gulls. You can hardly walk without
stepping on them. Do you remember how we sat and watched the baby gulls
coming out, Nance?"

"Yes," nodded Nance. "And you nearly got your fingers bitten off by a
puffin when you felt in its hole."

"Ma dé, yes! They do bite."

"What do you call the rock?" asked Gard, nodding across at it.

"L'Etat," said Nance. "Mr. Cachemaille once told me that it had most
likely at one time been joined on to Little Sark by a Coupée, just the
same as Little Sark is joined to Sark. That's the Coupée, that shelf
under water where the tide runs so fast. Some day, he said, perhaps our
Coupée will go and we'll be an island just as L'Etat is."

"It won't be this week," said Bernel philosophically.

"It looks like the top of a high mountain just sticking up out of the
water," said Gard, fascinated by the ceaseless rush of those monstrous
waves in an otherwise calm sea.

"I suppose that is what it is," said Nance. "It's far worse at the other