“I’ve fallen down the cliff,” I said, feebly, “and I am hurt.”

“Mon Dieu!” he cried again.  The strong man shook, and his hand trembled as he stooped down and laid it under my head to lift it up a little.  His agitation touched me to the heart, even then, and I did my best to speak more calmly.

“Tardif,” I whispered, “it is not very much, and I might have been killed.  I think my foot is hurt, and I am quite sure my arm is broken.”

Speaking made me feel giddy and faint again, so I said no more.  He lifted me in his arms as easily and tenderly as a mother lifts up her child, and carried me gently, taking slow and measured strides up the steep slope which led homeward.  I closed my eyes, glad to leave myself wholly in his charge, and to have nothing further to dread; yet moaning a little, involuntarily, whenever a fresh pang of pain shot through me.  Then he would cry again, “Mon Dieu!” in a beseeching tone, and pause for an instant as if to give me rest.  It seemed a long time before we reached the farm-yard gate, and he shouted, with a tremendous voice, to his mother to come and open it.  Fortunately she was in sight, and came toward us quickly.

He carried me into the house, and laid me down on the lit de fouaille—­a wooden frame forming a sort of couch, and filled with dried fern, which forms the principal piece of furniture in every farm-house kitchen in the Channel Islands.  Then he cut away the boot from my swollen ankle, with a steady but careful touch, speaking now and then a word of encouragement, as if I were a child whom he was tending.  His mother stood by, looking on helplessly and in bewilderment, for he had not had time to explain my accident to her.

But for my arm, which hung helplessly at my side, and gave me excruciating pain when he touched it, it was quite evident he could do nothing.

“Is there nobody who could set it?” I asked, striving very hard to keep calm.

“We have no doctor in Sark now,” he answered.  “There is no one but Mother Renouf.  I will fetch her.”

But when she came she declared herself unable to set a broken limb.  They all three held a consultation over it in their own dialect; but I saw by the solemn shaking of their heads, and Tardif’s troubled expression, that it was entirely beyond her skill to set it right.  She would undertake my sprained ankle, for she was famous for the cure of sprains and bruises, but my arm was past her?  The pain I was enduring bathed my face with perspiration, but very little could be done to alleviate it.  Tardif’s expression grew more and more distressed.

“Mam’zelle knows,” he said, stooping down to speak the more softly to me, “there is no doctor nearer than Guernsey, and the night is not far off.  What are we to do?”

“Never mind, Tardif,” I answered, resolving to be brave; “let the women help me into bed, and perhaps I shall be able to sleep.  We must wait till morning.”