Then he would pull up the blinds and they would enter with an easy bound and a scramble, and while he hastily flung on his things they would prowl about, now pushing investigating noses into an open drawer, and again taking a passing drink out of his water-jug by way of first breakfast.

Then, away through the gaps in the jewelled hedges, with the larks at their matins overhead, and the tethered cows nuzzling out the dainty morning grasses, and watching the intruders speculatively till they passed out of sight into the next field.

“Which way?  Which way?  Which way?” shrieked Scamp, as he tore to and fro down every possible road to show that all were absolutely alike to him.  While Punch bounded lightly to the first dividing of the ways and waited there with slow-swinging tail to see which road Man would choose.

The Harbour—­or Les Laches—­which?  Every morning Scamp raced hopefully towards the sweet-smelling tunnel of hawthorn trees that led down to the other tunnel in the rock and the tiny harbour, because, for a very small dog, the granite slip was much easier to compass than the steep ledges of Les Laches.  And every morning Punch waited quietly at Colinette to see how Man would go.

And when the tide was low and the harbour empty, Punch knew it was Les Laches almost before Man’s face had turned that way, and off he went at a gallop, and Scamp came tearing back with expostulatory yelps, and got in Punch’s way and was rolled head over heels, but always came right side up at the fourth turn and rushed on without even a remonstrance, for that was a very small price to pay for the exalted companionship of Punch and Man.

So, past La Peignerie and La Forge, with the thin blue smoke of gorse fires floating down from every dumpy chimney and adding a flavour to the sweetest air in the world,—­with a morning greeting from everyone they met—­over the heights and down the zigzag path to the sloping ledges, and in they went, all three, into the clearest and crispest water in the world, water that tingled and sparkled, full charged with life and energy.

Then shivers and shakes, and hasty play with a towel, and they were racing back across the heights to breakfast and the passing of another day, of which the greatest charm had passed already with that plunge into the life-giving sea.

If you are inclined to think that I enlarge too much on these two friends of his, let me remind you that a man is known by the company he keeps, and these two were Graeme’s sole companions for many a day—­those first dark days in the sunny little isle, when all human companionship would have been abhorrent to him.

In their company he found himself again.  Their friendship weaned him by degrees from the jaundiced view of life which Margaret’s dereliction had induced.  They drew him, in time, from his brooding melancholy, and through the upbuilding of the body restored him to a quieter mind.