"Then the quicker we get home the better," and we hurried on.

When we came out at last on the cliffs the sea lay below us as smooth as a
clouded mirror. It would mean a toilsome passage, but toil was nothing
compared with Torode. We walked rapidly along till we came to a village,
which we learned, afterwards, was not Carteret but Surtainville. There were
boats lying on the shore, and we slipped down the cliff before we reached
the first house, and made our way towards them. One of those boats we had
to use if we had to fight for it, but we had no desire to fight, only to
get away at once without dispute and without delay.

We fixed on the one that seemed the least heavy and clumsy, though none
were much to our liking, and while Le Marchant hunted up a pair of spare
oars in case of accident, I found a piece of soft white stone and scrawled
on a board, "Boat will be returned in two days, keep this money for
hire"--and emptied all I possessed onto it. Then we ran the clumsy craft
into the water and settled down to a long seven hours' pull.

But labour was nothing when so much--everything--waited at the other end of
the course. We went to it with a will, and I do not suppose that old boat
had ever moved so rapidly since she was built.

We had been rowing hard for, we reckoned, close on three hours when the sun
rose. The gray shadows drew slowly off the face of the sea, and we stood up
and scanned the northern horizon anxiously. But there was no flaw upon the
brimming white rim. Torode had evidently not been able to get round La
Hague, and a man must have been blind indeed not to see therein the hand of
Providence; for a cap full of wind and he would have been down on us like a
wolf on two strayed lambs. But now Sercq lay straight in front of our
boat's nose, like a great gray whale nuzzling its young, and every long