For the wife it might help me to, and the security and comfort it might bring to her, I desired it ardently, and my thoughts were much exercised as to how to arrive at it in sufficiency.

I found myself at one of the great cross-roads of life, where, I suppose, most men find themselves at one time or another.
I knew that much--to me, perhaps, everything--must depend on how I chose now, and I spent much time wandering in lonely places, and lying among the gorse cushions or in the short grass of the headlands, thinking of Carette and trying to see my way to her.
There were open to us all, in those days, four ways of life--more, maybe, if one had gone seeking them, but these four right to our hands.
I could ship again in the trading line,--and some time, a very long way ahead, I might come to the command of a ship, if I escaped the perils of the sea till that time came.

But I could not see Carette very clearly in that line of life.
I could join a King's ship, and go fight the Frenchmen and all the others who were sometimes on our side and sometimes against us.

But I could not see Carette at all in that line of life.
I could settle down to the quiet farmer-fisherman life on Sercq, as my grandfather had done with great contentment.

But I was not my grandfather, and he was one in a thousand, and he had never had to win Carette.
And, lastly,--I could join my fellows in the smuggling or privateering lines, in which some of them, especially the Guernsey men, were waxing mightily fat and prosperous.
For reasons which I did not then understand, but which I do now, since I learned about my father, my mother's face was set dead against the free-trading.