For three or four minutes after he was gone, Annette remained
motionless in her seat, wearing her patient, deprecatory expression,
while her eyes rested on the window, without apparently seeing the
lights and dimly outlined figures that were visible on the _rade_
outside. Then her glance seemed to concentrate itself on something: the
nervous, trembling lips closed rigidly, and before they saw what she was
about to do, she had risen from her chair, and darted from the room and
out into the night.

"Our Lady guard her! It was the boats she caught sight of," said
Victorine, the cook. "There are the lights off the bay. Go, stop her,
Jeanne! Monsieur will be angry with us if anything befall her."

"Dame! I will not go," said her sister. "Can you not see that Annette is
bewitched? If she must go, she must. I will have nought to do with it."

Victorine, however, scouted her younger sister's reasoning, and hurried
out across the small court-yard, through the gate and on to the road.

The whole village seemed gathered at the harbour-side; children and old
men, lads and women, eager, yet with the patient quietness that is the
way with the Breton folk. Here a demure group of white-coiffed girls
stood waiting with scarce a word passing among them, waiting at the
quay-side for the fathers, brothers, or sweethearts, that for months had
been facing the perils of the northern seas. There a dark-eyed,
loose-limbed Breton peasant, the wildness of whose look bewrayed the
gentleness of his nature, was arguing with a white-haired patriarch
about the probable value of this year's haul: while quaint-looking
children in little tight-fitting bonnets and clattering sabots clung