road that night, the very hour that he died. For it was borne in on me
that he had met her in the way, as he had said, and I asked her, as she
lay a-dying, if it was Paul that she had seen; and she looked at me with
eyes that spoke as plain as the speech that she had lost: and said that
it was he."

Jules was ordinarily a silent man: he told the story slowly, with long
pauses between the sentences: and when he had once told it, he never
spoke of it again.

Now Annette thought of many things in her quiet, clear-sighted way. She
knew that her mother had been found senseless at the foot of the menhir,
which they called Jean of Kerdual, just beyond the crest of the hill:
and she had often noticed the shadow which the great, weird stone threw
across the road, and thought how like it was (especially by moonlight)
to the figure of a fisherman with his peaked cap and blouse. She
believed there was more in this than a chance resemblance; for to a
Breton girl the supernatural world is very real: and she had no doubt
that the spirit of Paul's father haunted the stone that was so like his
bodily form, and that on the night when he was drowned, the dumb menhir
had found voice, and had spoken to her mother in his name. Annette
always avoided Jean of Kerdual, if it was possible to do so, and would
never let his shadow fall upon her. She felt that the solemn, world-old
stone was in some way hostile to her, and attributed her dumbness to its
influence.

She often wished that she and her father did not live so near the stone.
It had come to be like a nightmare to her. She would dream that it stood
threateningly over her, enveloping her in its shadow: that she was
struggling to speak, and that it reached forth a hand, heavy as stone,