and the officer, thinking he was grieving for his father, left him alone.




ELEVEN YEARS AFTER

CHAPTER V

The King of France was no longer sending adventurers to capture the
outposts of England. He was rather, in despair, beginning to wind in
again the coil of disaster which had spun out through the helpless
fingers of Neckar, Calonne, Brienne and the rest, and was in the end to
bind his own hands for the guillotine.

The Isle of Jersey, like a scout upon the borders of a foeman's country,
looked out over St. Michael's Basin to those provinces where the war of
the Vendee was soon to strike France from within, while England, and
presently all Europe, should strike her from without.

War, or the apprehension of war, was in the air. The people of the
little isle, living always within the influence of natural wonder and the
power of the elements, were deeply superstitious; and as news of dark
deeds done in Paris crept across from Carteret or St. Malo, as men-of-war
anchored in the tide-way, and English troops, against the hour of
trouble, came, transport after transport, into the harbour of St.
Heliers, they began to see visions and dream dreams. One peasant heard
the witches singing a chorus of carnage at Rocbert; another saw, towards
the Minquiers, a great army like a mirage upon the sea; others declared
that certain French refugees in the island had the evil eye and bewitched