that had hobbled into the auberge with the news that Christine Leroux
was lying like one dead by the roadside? On the other hand, however, it
was asserted with equal assurance, that she had seen in the moonlight,
with her own eyes, the evil spirit of the dunes: him of whom all
travellers by night must beware; for it was his pleasure to delude them
by showing lights as if of cottage windows on the waste land, where no
cottage was: while twice within living memory, he had kindled false
fires on the great rock out at sea, which they called Le Géant, luring
mariners to their death: and woe betide the solitary wayfarer whose path
he crossed!

Annette's father knew what his wife had seen: and one winter evening
beside the peat-fire, as Annette was busy with her distaff, and he sat
smoking and watching the glowing embers, he told her her mother's story.
She and Paul's father, the elder Paul Gignol, had been betrothed in
their youth; but his fishing-smack had struck on the rocks one foggy
night, and gone down, and with it all his worldly wealth. And
Christine's father had broken off the match; for he had never been
favourable to it, and how was Paul to keep her now with nothing to look
to, but what might be picked up in the harbour? And Paul was like one
mad, and threatened to do her a bodily mischief, so that she was afraid
to walk out at night by herself: and her father offered him money to go
away: and he refused the money: but he went off at last, hiring himself
out on a cargo-boat, and declaring as he went, that one day yet, he
would meet Christine in the way, and have his revenge. And he was abroad
for years, and wedded some English woman in one of the British sea-port
towns, and at last was lost at sea on the very night on which Annette
was born.

"And his spirit it was, Annette, that appeared to your mother in the