HOW CARETTE AND I WERE GIRL AND BOY TOGETHER I suppose I could fill a great book with my recollections of those wonderful days when I was a boy of twelve and Carette Le Marchant was a girl of ten, and far and away the prettiest girl in Sercq,--or in Guernsey or Jersey either, for that matter, I'll wager.

And at that time I would have fought on the spot any boy not too visibly beyond me who dared to hold any other opinion.
My mother and my grandfather did not by any means approve my endless battles, I am bound to say, and I do not think I was by nature of a quarrelsome disposition, but it seems to me now that a good deal of my time was spent in boyish warfare, and as often as not Carette was in one way or another accountable for it.
Not that herself or her looks could be called in question.

These spoke for themselves, though I grant you she was a fiery little person and easily provoked.

If any attack was made on her looks or her doings it was usually only for my provocation, as the knights in olden times flung down their gauntlets by way of challenge.

But there were other matters relating to Carette, or rather to her family, which I could defend only with my fists, and not at all with my judgment even at twelve years old, and only for her sake who had, of herself, nothing whatever to do with them.
For the Le Marchants of Brecqhou were known and held in a somewhat wholesome respect of fear, by all grown-up dwellers in the Islands, from Alderney to Jersey.
It was not simply that they were bold and successful free-traders.
Free-trade--or, as some would call it, smuggling--was the natural commerce of the Islands, and there were not very many whose fingers were not in the golden pie.