A Loose End | Page 5

followed by one sharp cry, was heard; then all was still.
"Good God! That's some one fallen down the path--why don't you go and see, child?" but Marie seemed as if she could not stir. Old Andr�� slowly dragged himself on to his feet, and took her arm, and they went together. At the foot of the path they found the body of Pierre, dead, his head having struck against a rock.
"He must have missed his footing in the dark," said Andr��, when they had rowed round to the fishing village to carry the news, and the solitary constable had bustled forth, and was endeavouring to collect information about the accident from the only two witnesses, of whom the girl seemed to have lost the power of speech.
"He must have missed his footing in the dark; and then the rope broke with his weight and the clutch he give it. It lies there all loose on the ground."
"It shouldn't have broken," said the constable. "But I always did say we'd ought to have an iron chain down there."

CHAPTER III.
Fifty years had passed, with all their seasons' changes, and the changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had been put there, but the rope had never broken again.
A violent south-west gale was blowing, driving scud and sea-foam before it, while ever new armies of rain-clouds advanced threateningly across the shadowy waters--mighty, moving mists, whose grey-winged squadrons, swift and irresistible, enveloped and almost blotted from sight the little rock-bound island, against which the forces of nature seemed to be for ever spending themselves in vain. From time to time through a gap in the shifting cloud-ranks there shone a sudden dazzling gleam of sunlight on the white crests of the sea-horses far away.
The good French pastor, who struggled to discharge the offices of religion in that impoverished and for the most part socially abandoned spot, had just allowed himself to be persuaded by his wife that it was unnecessary to visit his sick parishioner at the other end of the island that afternoon, when a loud rat-tat was heard in the midst of a shriek of wind, through a grudged inch of open door-way. The hurricane burst into the house while a dripping, breathless girl panted forth her message, that "old Marie" had been suddenly taken bad, and was dying, and wanted but one thing in the world, to see the Vicar.
"I wonder what it is she has got to say," said the Vicar, as his wife buttoned his mackintosh up to his throat. "I always did think there was something strange about old Marie."
A mile of bitter, breathless battling with the storm, then a close cottage-room, with rain-flooded floor, the one small window carefully darkened, and on a pillow in the furthest corner, shaded by heavy bed-curtains, a wrinkled old woman's face, pinched and colourless, on which the hand of Death lay visibly.
But in the eagerness with which she signed to the pastor to come close, and in the keen glance she cast round the room to see that no one else was near, the vigour of life still asserted itself.
"I've somewhat to tell you, Father," she began in a rapid undertone, in the island dialect. "I can't carry it to the grave with me, tho' I've borne it in my conscience all my life. When I was a young lass it happened, when things was different, and the men were rougher than now, and strange deeds might be done from time to time, and never come under the eye o' the law. And you must judge me, Father, by the way things was then, for that was what I had to think of when it all happened.
"There was a young man that used to come a' courting me when I was a lass o' nineteen, and he had a black heart for all he spoke so fair; but I didn't see it at the first, and he was that cliver and insinuatin', and had such a way o' talkin', and made so much o' me, I couldn't but listen to him for a while. And he used to go out fishin' wi' my father, and Daddy, he was lame, so Pierre used to take the fish round and do jobs with the boats for him, and this and that, so as Daddy thought a rare lot o' him; and when he seed we