The little Norman isle, home of Pierre Laroche, so wild and bleak-looking many months of the year, resembles a flowering garden in the spring; then, its lap full of buds and blossoms, smiling, redolent, it lifts itself from the broad bosom of the deep. And all the light embellishments of the golden time it sets forth daintily; fringing the black cliffs with clusters of sea campion, white and frothy as the spray, trailing green ivy from precipitous heights to the verge of the wooing waters, whose waves seem to creep up timorously, peep into the many caves, bright with sea-anemones, and retreat quickly, as awed by a sudden glimpse of fairyland.
Near the entrance of one of these magical chambers, abloom with strange, scentless flowers, sat, a certain afternoon in April, a man and a woman, who, looking out over the blue sea, conversed in desultory fashion.
"From what your father tells me, Mistress Nanette," the man, an aged priest, was speaking, "the Seigneur Desaurac should be here to-day?"
"My father had a letter from him a few days ago to that effect," answered the young woman somewhat shortly.
"Let me see," apparently the old man did not notice the change in his companion's manner, "he has been away now about a year? It was in July he brought the Governor's daughter to the island one day and sailed the next!" Nanette made a movement. "How time flies!" he sighed. "Let us hope it assuages grief, as they say! You think she is contented here?"
"The Lady Elise? Why not? At least, she seems so; has with her, her old nurse, my aunt, who fortunately escaped from the Mount—"
"But the death of her father? It must have been a terrible blow—one not easy to forget!"
"Of course," said Nanette slowly, "she has felt his loss."
The old man gazed down. "I have sometimes wondered what she knows about the causes of the enmity that existed between his Excellency and the Black Seigneur?"
The other's eyes lifted keenly. "When last did you see her, Father?"