Plainly she was standing-by, waiting; plainly then her crew—­or those of them engaged for the assault—­were detained yet upon the island; whence (to make matters surer) there sounded, as our boat ran up to it, a few loose dropping shots and a single cry—­a cry that travelled across to us down the lane of light directing us to the quay.  The blaze had died down; the upper keep, now overhanging us, stood black and unlit against a sky almost as black; but on a stairway at the base of it torches were moving and the flame of them shone on the slippery steps of a quay to which I guided the boat.  There, jamming the helm down with a thrust of the foot, I ran forward and lowered sail.

We carried more way than I had reckoned for, and—­the Princess having no science to help me—­this brought us crashing in among a press of boats huddled in the black shadow alongside the quay-steps with such force as almost to stave in the upper timbers of a couple and sink them where they lay.  No voice challenged us.  I wondered at this as I gripped at the dark dew-drenched canvas to haul it inboard, and while I wondered, a strong light shone down upon us from the quay’s edge.

A man stood there, holding a torch high over his head and shading his eyes as he peered down at the boat—­a tall man in a Trappist habit girt high on his naked legs almost to the knees.

“My father?” I demanded.  “Where is my father?”

He made no answer, but signed to us to make our landing, and waited for us, still holding the torch high while I helped the Princess from one boat to another and so to the slippery steps.

“My father?” I demanded again.

He turned and led us along the quay to a stairway cut in the living rock.  At the foot of it he lowered his torch for a moment that we might see and step aside.  Two bodies lay there—­two of his brethren, stretched side by side and disposedly, with arms crossed on their breasts, ready for burial.  High on the stairway, where it entered the base of a battlemented wall under an arch of heavy stonework, a solitary monk was drawing water from a well and sluicing the steps.  The water ran past our feet, and in the dawn (now paling about us) I saw its colour. . . .

The burnt building—­it had been the Genoese barracks—­stood high on the right of the stairway.  Its roof had fallen in upon the flames raging through its wooden floors, so that what had been but an hour ago a blazing furnace was now a shell of masonry out of which a cloud of smoke rolled lazily, to hang about the upper walls of the fortress.  Through its window-spaces, void and fire-smirched, as now and again the reek lifted, I saw the pale upper-sky with half a dozen charred ends of roof-timber sharply defined against it—­a black and broken grid; and while yet I stared upward another pair of monks crossed the platform above the archway.  They carried a body between them—­the body of a man in the Genoese uniform—­and were bearing it towards a bastion on the western side, that overhung the sea.  There the battlements hid them from me; but by-and-by I heard a splash. . . .