Huguenot marriage is as good as any in the presence of bears and
buccaneers, let her call the hound her husband, if she likes. I have done
with her; and the race from which she came disowns her forever."

Thus it was done. Etienne was released from his chains and sent on shore.
An arquebus and ammunition were given him; and resisting the impulse to
send his first shot through the heart of his tyrant, he landed, and the
last glimpse seen of the group as the _Grande Hermine_ sailed away,
was the figure of Marguerite sobbing on his shoulder, and of the unhappy
nurse, now somewhat plethoric, and certainly not the person to be selected
as a pioneer, sitting upon a rock, weeping profusely. The ship's sails
filled, the angry Roberval never looked back on his deserted niece, and
the night closed down upon the lonely Isle of Demons, now newly occupied
by three unexpected settlers, two of whom at least were happy in each
other.

A few boxes of biscuits, a few bottles of wine, had been put on shore
with them, enough to feed them for a few weeks. They had brought flint and
steel to strike fire, and some ammunition. The chief penalty of the crime
did not lie, after all, in the cold and the starvation and the wild beasts
and the possible visits of pirates; it lay in the fact that it was the
Island of Demons where they were to be left; and in that superstitious age
this meant everything that was terrible. For the first few nights of their
stay, they fancied that they heard superhuman voices in every wind that
blew, every branch that creaked against another branch; and they heard, at
any rate, more substantial sounds from the nightly wolves or from the
bears which ice-floes had floated to that northern isle. They watched
Roberval sail away, he rejoicing, as the old legend of Thevet says, at
having punished them without soiling his hands with their blood (_ioueux
de les auior puniz sans se souiller les mains en leurs sang_). They