"Going back same way?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'll see you off. Sure you can manage it?"
"Oh yes. Good-bye, Carette!" as he moved towards the door.
"Good-bye, Phil! I'll be at Aunt Jeanne's just as soon as I can," piped Carette, out of the darkness of her inner room.
And Jean Le Marchant led me back across the Island to the Galé de Jacob, and stood watching me from Belème till I scrambled in among the rocks at the foot of Saut de Juan.
That was the first time I visited Carette's home and met her father, though her brothers I had seen at times on Sercq, viewing them from a distance with no little awe on account of the many strange stories told about them. They were not in the habit of mixing much with the Island men, however. They kept their own counsel and their own ways, and this aloofness did not make for good comradeship when they did come across.
It was years before I set foot on Brecqhou again.
These brief glimpses of those bright early days I have set down that you might know us as we were. For myself I delight to recall them, but if I were to tell you one quarter of all our doings and sayings when we were boy and girl together, with but one will—and that Carette's—it would make a volume passing bounds.
And it is possible that my recollection of these things is coloured somewhat with the knowledge and feeling of the later times, for a man may no more fully enter again into the thoughts of his childhood than he may enter full grown into his childhood's clothes. I have told them, however, just as they are present in my own mind, and they are at all events true.