clamping his heart. Never again could he rise in the morning with a song
on his lips; never again his happy meditations go lilting with the
clanging blows of the adze and the singing of the saws.

All these things had vanished when he looked into a tent-door on the
Ecrehos. Now, in spite of himself, whenever he thought upon Guida's
face, this other fateful figure, this Medusan head of a traitor,
shot in between.

Since his return his father had not been strong enough to go abroad; but
to-day he meant to walk to the Vier Marchi. At first Ranulph had decided
to go as usual to his ship-yard at St. Aubin's, but at last in anxious
fear he too had come to the Vier Marchi. There was a horrible
fascination in being where his father was, in listening to his
falsehoods, in watching the turns and twists of his gross hypocrisies.

But yet at times he was moved by a strange pity, for Olivier Delagarde
was, in truth, far older than his years: a thin, shuffling, pallid
invalid, with a face of mingled sanctity and viciousness. If the old man
lied, and had not been in prison all these years, he must have had misery
far worse, for neither vice nor poverty alone could so shatter a human
being. The son's pity seemed to look down from a great height upon the
contemptible figure with the beautiful white hair and the abominable
mouth. This compassion kept him from becoming hard, but it would also
preserve him to hourly sacrifice--Prometheus chained to his rock. In the
short fortnight that had gone since the day upon the Ecrehos, he had
changed as much as do most people in ten years. Since then he had seen
neither Philip nor Guida.

To Carterette he seemed not the man she had known. With her woman's