"We cannot give you much accommodation, monsieur," the fisherman said. "There is only the loft upstairs, and, for to-night, the sails to sleep on; but we will try and make you more comfortable to-morrow."
"I care nothing for comfort," Harry answered, "so make no change for me. Just treat me as if I were what I shall seem to be—a young fisherman who has come to work with you for a bit. I will row with you and help you with your nets. Your sister has promised to send a boy every day with all the news she can gather. Now, if you have a piece of bread I will gladly eat it, for I have touched nothing since breakfast."
"We can do better than that for you," the woman replied, and in a few minutes some fish were frying over the fire. Fortunately the long hours he had been on his feet had thoroughly tired Harry out, and after eating his supper he at once ascended to the loft, threw himself on the heap of sails, and in a few minutes was sound asleep. The next morning he dressed himself in the fisherman's clothes with which he had been provided, and went down stairs.
"You will do," Pierre said, looking at him; "but your hands and face are too white. But I was tanning my sails yesterday, and there is some of the stuff left in the boiler; if you rub your hands and face with that you will do well."
Harry took the advice, and the effect was to give him the appearance of a lad whose face was bronzed by long exposure to the sea and air.
"You will pass anywhere now," Pierre said approvingly. "I shall give out that you belong to St. Nazaire, and are the son of a friend of mine whose fishing-boat was lost in the last gale, and so you have come to work for a time with me; no one would ask you any more. Besides, we are all comrades, and hate the Reds, who have spoilt our trade by killing all our best customers, so if they come asking questions here they won't get a word out of anyone."
For ten days Harry lived with the fisherman. Adolphe had returned in his lugger the day after his arrival there, and came over the next evening to see him. He said that it would be some little time before the lugger sailed again, but that if he was ready to start before she sailed he would manage to procure him a passage in some other craft. He said that he had already been talking to some of the sailors on the wharves, and that they had promised to go to the Tribunal when the girls were brought up before it, and that he would manage to get news from a friend employed in the prison when that would be.
Harry frequently went up in a boat to Nantes with Pierre with the fish they had caught. He had no fear of being recognized, and did not hesitate to land, though he seldom went far from the boat. Adolphe was generally there, and he and two or three of his comrades, who were in the secret, always hailed him as an old acquaintance, so that had any of the spies of the Revolutionists been standing there, no suspicion that Harry was other than he seemed would have entered their minds.
One evening, three weeks after Harry's arrival at the hut, Adolphe came in with his head bound up by a bandage.
"What is the matter, Adolphe?" Harry exclaimed.