"Possibly," he murmured, looking strangely self-conscious.
"Well, you are lucky, take my word for it," said the rover, watching the course of his little vessel along the head of the peninsula. "You have not even a dog to miss you."
"I have only you, Maître Peyrol."
"That's what I was thinking," said Peyrol half to himself, while Michel, who had good sea-legs, kept his balance to the movements of the craft without taking his eyes from the rover's face.
"No," Peyrol exclaimed suddenly, after a moment of meditation, "I could not leave you behind." He extended his open palm towards Michel.
"Put your hand in there," he said.
Michel hesitated for a moment before this extraordinary proposal. At last he did so, and Peyrol, holding the bereaved fisherman's hand in a powerful grip, said:
"If I had gone away by myself, I would have left you marooned on this earth like a man thrown out to die on a desert island." Some dim perception of the solemnity of the occasion seemed to enter Michel's primitive brain. He connected Peyrol's words with the sense of his own insignificant position at the tail of all mankind; and, timidly, he murmured with his clear, innocent glance unclouded, the fundamental axiom of his philosophy:
"Somebody must be last in this world."
"Well, then, you will have to forgive me all that may happen between this and the hour of sunset."