Here was the acid that ate home, the black hopelessness, the machine of fate clamping his heart.

Never again could he rise in the morning with a song on his lips; never again his happy meditations go lilting with the clanging blows of the adze and the singing of the saws.
All these things had vanished when he looked into a tent-door on the Ecrehos.

Now, in spite of himself, whenever he thought upon Guida's face, this other fateful figure, this Medusan head of a traitor, shot in between.
Since his return his father had not been strong enough to go abroad; but to-day he meant to walk to the Vier Marchi.

At first Ranulph had decided to go as usual to his ship-yard at St.Aubin's, but at last in anxious fear he too had come to the Vier Marchi.

There was a horrible fascination in being where his father was, in listening to his falsehoods, in watching the turns and twists of his gross hypocrisies.
But yet at times he was moved by a strange pity, for Olivier Delagarde was, in truth, far older than his years: a thin, shuffling, pallid invalid, with a face of mingled sanctity and viciousness.