The Project Gutenberg eBook, Flower of the Gorse, by Louis Tracy

FLOWER OF THE GORSE

BY

LOUIS TRACY

AUTHOR OF

THE WINGS OF THE MORNING,

ONE WONDERFUL NIGHT, Etc.

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1915 by Edward J. Clode.

Dans la ville des meunières,

Pont Aven, pays d'Amour,

Au Bord des ruisseaux d'eau claire,

Fleur d'Ajonc chante toujours.

—Breton Song.

CONTENTS

FLOWER OF THE GORSE

CHAPTER I
THE TOWER AND THE WELL

"O, là, là! See, then, the best of good luck for each one of us this year!"

Although Mère Pitou's rotund body, like Falstaff's, was fat and scant o' breath, and the Pilgrims' Way was steep and rocky, some reserve of energy enabled her to clap her hands and scream the tidings of high fortune when the notes of a deep-toned bell pealed from an alp still hidden among the trees.

Three girls, fifty paces higher up the path, halted when they heard that glad cry—and, indeed, who would not give ear to such augury?

"Why should the clang of a bell foretell good luck, Mother?" cried Barbe, the youngest, seventeen that September day, and a true Breton maid, with eyes like sloes, and cheeks the tint of ripe russet apples, and full red lips ever ready to smile shyly, revealing the big, white, even teeth of a peasant.

"Mother" signaled that explanations must await a more opportune moment.

"Madame Pitou can't utter another word," laughed Yvonne, the tallest girl of the trio.

"She has had some secret on the tip of her tongue all day," said Madeleine, who was so like Barbe that she might have been an elder sister; though the sole tie between the two was residence in the same village. "Don't you remember how she kept saying in the train?—'Now, little ones, ask Sainte Barbe to be kind to you. She'll hear your prayers a kilometer away, even though you whisper them.'"

"Yes, and Mama would have liked us to begin singing a hymn when we started from the foot of the hill, but she thought Monsieur Ingersoll and Monsieur Tollemache would only be amused," put in Barbe.

"They would certainly have been amused before Madame Pitou reached the top, singing!" tittered Yvonne.

"Is it possible that I shall ever be as stout as Mama?" murmured Barbe, and the mere notion of such a catastrophe evoked a poignant anxiety that was mirrored in her eyes.

"Ah, Mignonne, now you know the form your petition to Sainte Barbe must take," smiled Yvonne.

"It's all very well for you, Yvonne, to chaff us smaller ones," pouted Madeleine. "You're tall, and slim, and fair, and you carry yourself like the pretty American ladies who come to Pont Aven in the season, the ladies who wear such simple clothes, and hardly look a year older than their daughters, and walk leagues in men's boots, and play tennis before déjeuner. Of course you can't help being elegant. You're American yourself."

The recipient of this tribute turned it aside deftly. "Sometimes I think I am more Breton than American," she said.

"Yes, everyone says that," agreed Barbe loyally. "Next year, Yvonne, they'll make you Queen of the Gorse."

With the innocence of youth, or perhaps with its carelessness, Barbe had raised a topic as prickly as the gorse itself, because Madeleine had been a maid of honor that year, and might reasonably expect the regal place in the succeeding Fête of the Fleurs d'Ajonc. Happily, Yvonne, if endowed with a sense of humor, was eminently good-natured and tactful.

"Nothing of the sort," she replied. "My father will never allow me to be photographed, and there would be a riot in Pont Aven if the shops couldn't sell picture postcards of the Queen."

"Hurry up!" cried single-minded Barbe. "Let's pray to Sainte Barbe before Mother comes, or she'll be telling me what I must ask for, and I mean to take your advice, Yvonne."

Two faces were turned instantly toward the invisible shrine of the puissant saint, and it would place no heavy strain on the intellect to guess what favors were sought. But Yvonne hesitated. She had not been reared in the precise religious faith of her companions. Opinions garnered in the Bohemian atmosphere of John Ingersoll's studio were in ill accord with the uncompromising dogma taught in the convent on the hill overlooking the estuary of the Aven and labored by every sermon preached in the picturesque church near the bridge.

Yet at that instant some words uttered by her father reached her ears, and, moved by sudden impulse, she raised her eyes to the tiny arch of light that marked the spot near the summit where the interlacing branches of the avenue of elms came to an end.

"Sweet Lady Barbara," she breathed, "if you have it in your power to favor us poor mortals, please give my dear father a happy year!"

The bell, after a few seconds of silence, renewed its clamor, and the pretty unbeliever accepted the omen. Her friends, of course, regarded the answer as more than propitious: it was an assurance, an undoubted promise of saintly intercession.

"I love Mama more than anyone in the world, but I couldn't bear to measure a meter round my waist," said Barbe confidently.

"Even though I may never be Queen, it is something to have been a maid of honor," said Madeleine, demurely conciliatory now that her prayer was safely lodged.

Yvonne heard, but paid no heed. She was looking at the three people approaching the ledge of rock on which she and the others were standing.

Madame Pitou, like the girls, wore the costume of Brittany, conforming, of course, to the time-honored fashion that allots a special headgear to womankind in each district. Thus the coif supplies an unerring label of residence. A woman from Pont Aven would recognize a woman from Riec and another from Concarneau though she had never seen either before in her life; while all three would unite, without possibility of error, in saying of a fourth, "She comes from Auray."

The two men in Mère Pitou's company were just as surely classed by their attire as the women by their coifs. Both were artists, and each obeyed the unwritten law which says that he who would paint must don a knickerbocker suit, wear a wide-brimmed felt hat, disregard collar buttons, and display a loosely knotted necktie. Ingersoll, the elder, was content with clothes of brown corduroy which had seen many, if not better, days. His boots were strong and hobnailed, and his easy stride up the rough and uneven track would reassure one who doubted the stamina of his seemingly frail body. Tollemache, who affected gray tweed, a French gray silk tie, gray woolen stockings, and brown brogues, looked what he was, a healthy young athlete who would be equally at home on springy heather whether carrying an easel or a gun.

Tollemache had caught Mère Pitou's arm when she announced the message of the bell.

"One more outburst like that, my fairy, and we'll have to carry you up the remainder of the hill," he grinned.

"Mon Dieu! but I'm glad I made the best part of the pilgrimage in a train and a carriage!" twittered Madame. "Yet, though I dropped, I had to warn the little ones that the dear saint knew they were coming to her shrine."

"Is that what it means?"

"What else? A pity you are not a good Catholic, Monsieur Tollemache, or you might be granted a favor today."

"Oh, come now! That's no way to convert a black Presbyterian. Tell me that Sainte Barbe will get my next picture crowned by the Academy, and I'll fall on my knees with fervor."

"Tcha! Even a saint cannot obtain what Heaven does not allow."

Ingersoll laughed. "Mère Pitou may lose her breath; but she never loses her wit," he said. "Now I put forward a much more modest request. Most excellent Sainte Barbe, send me some mad dealer who will empty my studio at a thousand francs a canvas!"

Yvonne heard these words; yet, be it noted, she asked the saint to make her father happy, not prosperous. It was then that the bell rang a second time.

"Tiens!" exclaimed Madame Pitou. "The saint replies!"

"Like every magician, you achieve your effect by the simplest of contrivances—when one peeps behind the scenes," said Ingersoll. "Old Père Jean, custodian of the chapel, who will meet us at the summit, keeps a boy on guard, so that all good pilgrims may be put in the right frame of mind by hearing the bell accidentally. The boy saw our girls first, and then spied us. Hence the double tolling. Now, Madame, crush me! I can see lightning in your eye."

"Mark my words, Monsieur Ingersoll, the saint will send that dealer, and he will certainly be mad, since none but a lunatic would pay a thousand francs for any picture of yours."

Ingersoll seized her free arm. "Run her up, for Heaven's sake, Tollemache!" he cried in English. "Her tongue has scarified me every day for eighteen years, and age cannot wither, nor custom stale, its infinite variety."

Laughing, struggling, crying brokenly that ces Américains would be the death of her, and tripping along the while with surprising lightness of foot,—for Mère Pitou had been noted as the best dancer of the gavotte at any pardon held within a radius of ten miles of Pont Aven,—she was hurried to the waiting girls.

"Ah, that rascal of a father of yours!" she wheezed to Yvonne, relapsing into the Breton language, as was her invariable habit when excited, either in anger or mirth. "And this other overgrown imp! When they're beaten in argument they try to kill me. Gars! A nice lot I'm bringing to the holy chapel!"

"Never mind, chère maman," said the girl, taking her father's place, and clasping the plump arm affectionately. "When we descend the other side of the hill you'll have them at your mercy. Then you can tell them what you really think of them."

"They know now. Artists, indeed! Acrobats, I call them! Making sport of a poor old woman! Not that I'm astonished at anything Monsieur Ingersoll does. Everybody admits that he is touched here," and she dabbed a fat finger at her glistening forehead, "or he wouldn't bury himself alive in a Brittany village, because he really has talent. But that hulking Monsieur Tollemache ought to be showing off his agility before you girls instead of lugging me up the Pilgrims' Way. Cré nom! When little Barbe's father—Heaven rest his soul!—met me here one fête day before we were married, he wouldn't rest till he had swung himself round Sainte Barbe's tower by the shepherd's hooks; and me screaming in fright while I watched him, though bursting with pride all the time, since the other girls were well aware that he was only doing it to find out if I cared whether or not he fell and broke his neck."

"What's that?" inquired Tollemache; for Madame Pitou was speaking French again. "Where is this tower?"

"Oh, you'll shiver when you see it! You Americans eat so much beef that you can never leave the earth. That's why Frenchmen fly while you walk."

"Or run, my cabbage. You must admit that we can run?"

"The good Lord gave you those long legs for some purpose, no doubt."

"Well, Maman, we offered our petitions. What did you ask for?" said Yvonne.

Madame flung up her hands with a woebegone cry. "May the dear saint forgive me, but the monkey chatter of those two infidels put my prayer clean out of my head!"

"Gee whizz!" exclaimed Tollemache. "This time I'll run in earnest, or I'll catch it hot and strong," and he made off.

"No harm done," said Ingersoll. "Mère Pitou has all she wants in this world, and will enter the next with pious confidence."

For once the elderly dame kept a still tongue. Like every Breton woman, she was deeply religious, and rather given to superstition, and the momentary lapse that led her to forget a carefully thought out plea for saintly aid caused a pang of real distress.

Yvonne guessed the truth, and sympathized with her. "Father dear," she said, "promise now, this minute, that you will bring us all here again next year on Barbe's fête day, and that we shall fall on our knees while Madame offers her prayer, or she will be unhappy all day."

Ingersoll read correctly the look of reproach his daughter shot at him, and was genuinely sorry. He too understood the tribulation that had befallen his friend.

"By Jove!" he said instantly, "better than that, though I make the promise willingly, Madame Pitou and I must do immediate penance for our sins—she for neglect and I for irreverence—by going halfway down the hill again and toiling back."

He was by no means surprised when Mère Pitou took at his word. Away they went, and Yvonne did not fail to grasp the meaning of her father's significant glance toward the belfry as he turned on his heel. On no account was the boy to miss the arrival of yet a third batch of pilgrims!

Now, the belfry stood on the farther edge of a tiny plateau of rock and gorse that crowned the summit. On the left was Père Jean's cottage with its stable and weaving shed. Among the trees in the background rose the diminutive spire of Sainte Barbe's chapel, and it was evident that the slope of the hill was precipitous, because spire and treetops, though quite near, were almost on a level with the girl's eyes. From the side of the belfry a paved causeway led to a quaintly carved and weather-beaten open-air altar, and long flights of broad steps fell thence on one hand to the door of the chapel and on the other to the first of many paths piercing the dense woodland of the hillside.

Père Jean, a sprightly and wizened old peasant dressed in white linen, was already chatting with Tollemache and the other two girls. The boy, thinking the avenue was clear, had gone to the cottage for a tray of picture postcards.

Yvonne followed, and sent him to his lookout with definite instructions. "Make no mistake," she said, "and we'll buy at least a franc's worth of cards later." Then she rejoined her friends.

"Yes, I've seen it done," Père Jean was saying. "Sailors were the best; but the shepherds were brave lads too. Nowadays it is forbidden by the prefect."

"Why? Were there many accidents?" inquired Tollemache.

"Oh, yes, a few. You see, it seems easy enough at the commencement; but sometimes the heart failed when the body was swinging over the cliff. It is fatal to look down."

Madeleine's shoulders were bent over a low parapet. Yvonne, leaning on her, saw that the caretaker was talking of the feat that Barbe's father had accomplished many years earlier. The altar at the end of the causeway was shielded by a squat, square tower. In its walls, about six feet above the causeway, some iron rings were visible. They hung loose; but their staples were imbedded in the masonry, and each ring was about a yard apart from its fellow. A mass of rock gave ready access to the first pair; but thenceforth the venturesome athlete who essayed the passage must swing himself in air, gripping a ring alternately in the left hand and in both hands.

On one side, the left, the tower sank only to the level of the path beneath; but a glance over the opposite parapet revealed an awesome abyss.

Madeleine shuddered when she felt Yvonne's hand. "To think that men should be so foolish as to risk their lives in such a way!" she murmured.

"I suppose that anyone who let go was killed?" said Tollemache.

"Mais, non, M'sieu'," Père Jean assured him. "The blessed saint would not permit that. No one was ever killed, I'm told. But the prefect has forbidden it these twenty years."

"Are the rings in good condition?"

"Certainly, M'sieu'. Where now does one get such iron as was made in those days?"

"Let's test some of 'em, anyhow," said Tollemache, and before the horrified girls realized what he meant he had leaped from parapet to rock, and was clinging to a couple of rings.

"Oh, Monsieur Tollemache!" screamed Barbe.

"Please come back, Monsieur!" cried Madeleine.

"Hi! Hi! It is forbidden by the prefect!" bellowed Père Jean.

But Yvonne, though angry and pallid with fright, only said, "Don't be stupid, Lorry. I should never have thought you would show off in that silly manner."

She spoke in English. Tollemache, gazing down at her in a comical, sidelong way, answered in the same language.

"I'm not showing off. Do you think that any Frenchman ever lived who could climb where I couldn't?"

"No one said a word about you."

"Yes. Mère Pitou said I'd shiver when I saw the place. Now watch me shiver!"

He swung outward. Even in her distress, Yvonne noticed that he took a strong pull at each ring before trusting his whole weight to it. But she made no further protest, nor uttered a sound; though Madeleine and Barbe were screaming frantically, and the old caretaker's voice cracked with reiteration of the prefect's commands.

Tollemache was soon out of sight round the angle of the tower, and the two Breton girls ran to the other parapet to watch for his reappearance. Not so Yvonne. The dread notion possessed her that she might see Laurence Tollemache dashed to his death on those cruel rocks some sixty feet beneath, and she knew that, once witnessed, the horrific spectacle would never leave her vision. So she waited spellbound in front of the altar, and gazed mutely at some tawdry images that stood there. Could they help, these grotesque caricatures of heavenly beings, carved and gilded wooden blocks with curiously inane eyes and thick lips? Her senses seemed to be atrophied. She was aware of a feeling of dull annoyance when the boy, attracted by the screams and Père Jean's shrill vehemence, came running from his post, and thus would surely miss the second appearance of her father and Mère Pitou. But the young peasant was quick witted. He had seen the "pilgrims" turn and resume the ascent; so he dashed into the belfry, because he could thence obtain a rare view of an event that he had often heard of but never seen,—a man swinging himself round Sainte Barbe's tower by the shepherd's hooks, such being the local name of the series of rings.

So the bell tolled its deep, strong notes, and simultaneously Madeleine and Barbe shrieked in a wilder pitch of frenzy. Tollemache had just swung round the second angle of the tower. His left hand had caught the outermost ring on that side; but the staple yielded, and he vanished.

"Ah, mon Dieu! he has fallen!" cried Barbe, collapsing forthwith in a faint.

Fortunately Madeleine saved her from a nasty tumble on the rough stones; though she herself was nearly distraught with terror. Père Jean raced off down the right-hand flight of steps, moving with remarkable celerity for so old a man, and gasping in his panic:

"Mille diables! What will M'sieu' le Préfet say now?"

Evidently the caretaker feared lest Sainte Barbe's miraculous powers should not survive so severe a test. Yet his faith was justified. A shout was heard from the tower's hidden face.

"Je m'en fiche de ça!" was the cry. "I'm right as a nail. I've got to return the way I came—that's all."

Yvonne listened as one in a dream. She saw her father and Madame Pitou crossing the plateau. For an instant her eyes dwelt on the features of the frightened boy peering through an embrasure in the belfry. From some point beneath came the broken ejaculations of Père Jean, who was craning his neck from some precarious perch on the edge of the precipice to catch a glimpse of the mad American's shattered body. Madeleine was sobbing hysterically over the prostrate Barbe, and endeavoring with nervous fingers to undo the stiff linen coif round the unconscious girl's throat.

Now, after leaving the cottage, Yvonne had looked at the chapel, the entrance to which lay at the foot of the left-hand stairway. The sanctuary had a belfry of its own, a narrow, circular tower, pierced with lancet windows beneath a pointed roof. These windows were almost on a line with and about ten feet distant from the top of the wall of rock left by the excavation that provided a site for the building. Through one of them, which faced the causeway, could be seen a tiny white statue of Sainte Barbe. No more striking position could have been chosen for it. The image was impressive by reason of its very unexpectedness.

Hardly conscious of her action, Yvonne turned to the saint now to invoke her help. She murmured an incoherent prayer, and as she gazed distraught at the Madonna-like figure, so calm, so watchful in its aery, she heard the rhythmic clank of iron as the rings moved in their sockets. One fleeting glance over the left parapet revealed Tollemache in the act of swinging himself to the pair of rings above the rock that gave foothold.

Again he peered down at her, twisting his head awkwardly for the purpose. "Nothing much to it," he laughed, jerking out breathless words. "Of course it was a bit of a twister when that ring came away; but——"

He was safe. Yvonne deigned him no further heed. She hurried to Barbe's side.

"For goodness' sake help me to shake her and slap her hands!" she cried to Madeleine. "Monsieur Tollemache has spoiled the day for us already, and Mère Pitou will be ill if she thinks Barbe is hurt."

Barbe, vigorous little village girl, soon yielded to drastic treatment, and was eager as either of her friends to conceal from her mother the fact that she had fainted.

Tollemache, feeling rather sheepish in face of Yvonne's quiet scorn, strolled to the top of the steps down which Père Jean had scuttled. The old man's voice reached him in despairing appeal.

"M'sieu'! Speak, if you are alive! Speak, pour l'amour de Dieu!"

"Hello there!" he cried. "What's the row about? Here I am!"

Père Jean gazed up with bulging eyes, and himself nearly fell over the precipice. "Ah, Dieu merci!" he quavered. "But, M'sieu', didn't you hear me telling you that the prefect——"

"What's the matter?" broke in Ingersoll's quiet tones. "You all look as if you had seen a daylight ghost."

"I behaved like a vain idiot," explained Tollemache, seeing that none of the girls was minded to answer. "I tried to climb round the tower by those rings, and scared Yvonne and the others rather badly."

"How far did you go?"

"Oh, I was on the last lap; but a ring gave way."

Ingersoll knew the place of old, and needed no elaborate essay on the danger Tollemache had escaped. His grave manner betokened the depth of his annoyance.

"What happened then?" he said. "I went back, of course."

"Where did the ring break?"

"It didn't break. I pulled the staple out. That one—you see where the gap is."

Ingersoll leaned over the parapet. A glance sufficed.

"You crossed the valley face of the tower twice?" he said.

"Couldn't help myself, old sport."

"Then you described yourself with marvelous accuracy,—a vain idiot, indeed!"

"Dash it all!" protested Tollemache. "I've only done the same as scores of Frenchmen."

"Many of whom lost their lives. You had a pretty close call. Lorry, I'm ashamed of you!"

Mère Pitou added to Tollemache's discomfiture by the biting comment that her man had got round the tower, whereas he had failed.

Altogether it was a somewhat depressed party that was shown round the quaint old chapel of the patroness of armorers and artillerists by Père Jean, who had lost a good deal of his smiling bonhomie, and eyed Tollemache fearfully, evidently suspecting him of harboring some fantastic design of dropping from the gallery to the floor, or leaping from the chapel roof to the cliff.

Their spirits revived, however, as they descended a steep path to Sainte Barbe's well. Every chapel of Saint Barbara has, or ought to have, a well, and that at Le Faouet (three syllables, please, and sound the final T when you are in Brittany) is specially famous for its prophetic properties in affairs of the heart. Thus, a spring bubbles into a trough surmounted by a canopy and image of the saint. In the center of the trough, beneath two feet of limpid water, the spring rises through an irregular orifice, roughly four inches square, and all unmarried young people who visit the shrine try to drop pins into the hole. Success at the first effort means that the fortunate aspirant for matrimony will either be married within a year or receive a favorable offer.

So, after luncheon, which had been carried by a boy from the village on the hill opposite the Pilgrims' Way, the girls produced a supply of pins. Barbe was the first to try her luck. Three pins wriggled to the floor of the well; but a fourth disappeared, and Mère Pitou took the omen seriously.

"You will be married when you are twenty-one, ma petite," she said, "and quite soon enough, too. Then your troubles will begin."

Madeleine failed six times, and gave up in a huff. Yvonne's second pin vanished.

"O, là, là!" cried Mère Pitou, still deeply interested in this consultation of the fates. "Mark my words, you'll refuse the first and take the second!"

The old lady darted a quick look at Ingersoll; but he was smiling. He had schooled himself for an ordeal, and his expression did not change. Tollemache, too, created a diversion by seizing a pin, holding it high above the surface of the water, whereas each of the girls had sought apparently to lessen the distance as much as possible, and dropping it out of sight straight away.

"Look at that!" he crowed. "My girl will say snap as soon as I say snip. Here's her engagement ring!"

Plunging his left hand into a pocket, he brought to light the ring and staple torn from Sainte Barbe's tower. When hanging with one hand to the last hold-fast, on the wall overlooking sixty feet of sheer precipice, he had calmly pocketed the ring that proved treacherous.

Evidently Laurence Tollemache was a young man who might be trusted not to lose his head in an emergency.

Mère Pitou was not to be persuaded to tempt fortune, and Ingersoll, who was sketching the well rapidly and most effectively, was left alone, because Barbe, who would have called him to come in his turn, was bidden sharply by her mother to mind her own business.

Tollemache and Yvonne climbed the rocky path together when they began the return journey to Le Faouet. In the rays of the afternoon sun the rough granite boulders sparkled as though they were studded with innumerable small diamonds.

"Haven't you forgiven me yet, Yvonne?" he said, noticing her distrait air.

She almost started, so far away were her thoughts. "Oh, let us forget that stupidity," she replied. "I was thinking of something very different. Tell me, Lorry, has my father ever spoken to you of my mother?"

"No," he said.

"Do you know where she is buried?"

"No."

She sighed. Her light-hearted companion's sudden taciturnity was not lost on her. Neither Madame Pitou, Ingersoll's friend and landlady during eighteen years, nor Tollemache, who worked with him daily, could read his eyes like Yvonne, and she knew he was acting a part when he smiled because Sainte Barbe's well announced that she would be married at the second asking. And the odd thing was that she had endeavored to drop the first pin so that it would not fall into the fateful space. None but she herself had noted how it plunged slantwise through the water as though drawn by a lodestone.

Even Tollemache nursed a grievance against the well's divination. "I say," he broke in, "that pin proposition is all nonsense, don't you think?"

For some occult reason she refused to answer as he hoped she would. "You never can tell," she said. "Mère Pitou believes in it, and she has had a long experience of life's vagaries."

From some distance came Madeleine's plaint. "Just imagine! Six times! In six years I shall be twenty-five. I don't credit a word of it—so there! At the last pardon Peridot danced with me all the afternoon."

Even little Barbe was not satisfied. "Mama said the other day," she confided, "that I might be married before I was twenty."

Ingersoll and Mère Pitou, bringing up the rear, were silent; Madame because this hill also was steep, and Ingersoll because of thoughts that came unbidden. In fact, Sainte Barbe had perplexed some of her pilgrims.

CHAPTER II
THE FEAST OF SAINTE BARBE

On the morning of December 4 in that same year a postman walked up the narrow path leading to the front door of Mère Pitou's house in the Rue Mathias, Pont Aven, and handed in a bundle of letters. The family was at breakfast, the petit déjeuner of coffee and rolls that stays the appetite in every French household until a more substantial meal is prepared at noon. The weather was mild and bright, though a gusty sou'westerly wind was blowing; so door and windows were open.

Barbe saw the postman ere he unlatched the garden gate, and rose excitedly, nearly upsetting a cup in her haste.

"Why, what's the rush?" cried Ingersoll. "And who in the world are all these letters for?"

"Father dear, have you forgotten the date? This is Barbe's name day," said Yvonne.

"Oh, that's the explanation of tonight's festivity," laughed Ingersoll. "Sorry. It quite slipped my mind. Of course she has wagonloads of friends who make a point of remembering these things. Lucky Barbe! And, by the way, Madame, what about those pictures which the Lady of Le Faouet was to dispose of? It's high time she was getting busy. Here are three months sped and—if anything rather a slump in Ingersolls. Actually, my best commission thus far is a series of picture postcards of Le Pouldu—with benefits deferred till next season."

"Perhaps the good saint knew that you kept your tongue in your cheek while you were seeking her help," retorted Madame.

"Impossible. It was lolling out. You ungrateful one, didn't I climb the hill twice for your sake?"

Barbe exchanged a friendly word with the postman, who was well aware of the cause of this sudden increase in the mail delivery at the cottage. Then she ran in.

"One for you, M'sieu'—all the rest for me," she announced gleefully.

Ingersoll took his letter. It bore the Pouldu postmark and the printed name of a hotel. Usually such missives came from brother artists; but the handwriting on the envelop was essentially of the type that French hotelkeepers cultivate for the utter bamboozling of their foreign patrons. Yvonne glanced at it with some curiosity, and was still more surprised to see the look of humorous bewilderment on her father's face when he had mastered its contents.

"I take back everything I said, or even thought, about Sainte Barbe," he cried. "Learn how she has squelched me! The proprietor of the chief hotel at Le Pouldu offers four hundred francs for a picture of the plage with his hotel in the center. Certainly four hundred is a heap short of a thousand, which was the sum I named to her saintship; but then, a hôtelier isn't a dealer, and he promises to pay cash if the sketch is delivered in a week, because he wants it for a summer poster. Yvonne, have you finished breakfast? Run and find Peridot, there's a dear, and ask him if we can sail to Le Pouldu this morning. It'll save time to go by sea, and the tide will serve, I know. If Peridot says the weather is all right, drop in at Julia's, and invite Tollemache. We'll lunch gloriously with my hotel man, rub in the best part of the drawing afterward, and be back here in good time for the feast."

Yvonne hurried out. The hour was half-past eight, and the tide in the estuary of the Aven was already on the ebb. But she had not far to go. The Rue Mathias (nowadays glorified by a much more ambitious name) was not a minute's walk from the bridge that gives the village its name. Another minute brought her to the quay, where the brawling river escapes from its last millwheel, and tumbles joyously into tidal water. She was lucky. Peridot was there, mending a blue sardine net,—a natty, square-shouldered sailor, unusually fair for a Breton, though his blond hair was French enough in its bristliness, as a section of his scalp would have provided a first-rate clothes brush. He touched his cap with a smile when she appeared, and in answer to her query raised to the heavens those gray-green eyes which had earned him such a euphonious nickname.

"Yes, Mademoiselle Yvonne, we can make Le Pouldu by ten o'clock with this wind," he said. "We may get a wetting; but it won't be the first. Is—er—is Madeleine coming?"

"Not today. She promised to help Mère Pitou with tonight's supper. You will be there?"

"Wind and weather permitting, Ma'mselle. We go in your own boat, I suppose?"

"Yes. Can you allow fifteen minutes?"

"There will be plenty of water for the next half-hour."

Yvonne raced off again, this time to the Hotel Julia, not the huge modern annex,—that dominates the tiny marketplace of Pont Aven,—but the oldtime hostelry itself, tucked in snugly behind its four sycamores, like some sedate matron ever peering up in wonderment at its overgrown child across the street. In winter the habitués—the coterie of artists and writers who cluster under the wing of the famous Julia Guillou—eat in the dining room of the smaller hotel.

Crossing the terrace, a graveled part of the square shielded by the trees, Yvonne met Mademoiselle Julia herself, bustling forth to inspect eggs, poultry, and buckets of fish. This kindly, outspoken, resourceful-looking woman has tended and housed and helped at least two generations of painters. In her way she has done more for art than many academies.

"Is Monsieur Tollemache at breakfast, Mademoiselle?" inquired Yvonne.

Julia smiled broadly. Evidently it was the most natural thing imaginable that the pretty American girl, known to everyone in the village, should be asking the whereabouts of the stalwart youngster who would never be an artist, but was one of the hotel's most valued guests.

"Oui, ma chérie! I heard him shouting to Marie for three boiled eggs not so long ago. Out of three eggs one hatches a good meal. And how is your father? I haven't set eyes on him this week."

"He is so busy, Mademoiselle. There is so little daylight."

"Bring him to dinner on Sunday. We're roasting two of the biggest geese you ever saw!"

"He will be delighted, I'm sure."

Then Julia marched to conquer the venders of eatables. There would be a terrific argument; but the founder of modern Pont Aven would prevail.

Yvonne looked in through an open window of a delightful room, paneled in oak—on every panel a picture bearing a signature more or less eminent in the world of color. Tollemache was there, tapping his third egg.

"Lorry," she said, "Father and I are sailing to Le Pouldu. Will you come?"

"Will a duck swim?" was the prompt reply. "When do we start?"

"Soon. Be at the quay in ten minutes."

"By the clock. Plenty of oilskins in the locker?"

"Yes."

She sped away. A Frenchman, an artist who knew the Breton coast in all weathers, shook his head.

"Dangerous work, yachting off Finistère in December," he said. "What sort of boat are you going in?"

"Ingersoll's own tub, a vague—a sardine boat, you know."

"First-rate craft, of course. But mind you're not caught in a change of wind. The barometer is falling."

"Oh, as for that, we'll probably have Peridot in charge, and he was born with a caul; so he'll never be drowned. Even if he's not there, Ingersoll and Yvonne are good sailors, and I'm no fresh-water amateur."

"Well—good luck! I only ask you not to despise the Atlantic. Why is Ingersoll going to Le Pouldu at this time of the year?"

"Don't know, and don't care. It's an unexpected holiday for me; so my Salon study of the Bois d'Amour in winter must miss a day."

The Frenchman sighed; whether on account of the doubtful prospect before Tollemache's Salon picture or because of his own vanished youth, it would be hard to say.

"What a charming peasant girl—and how on earth did she acquire English with that perfect accent?" said a woman, a newcomer.

"She is the daughter of a celebrated American artist," explained the Frenchman.

"But why does she wear the Breton costume?"

"Because she has good taste."

"Oh! Is that a hit at current fashions?"

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "Madame asked for information," he said. "To wander off into an essay on clothes would be impolite."

Before nine o'clock the Hirondelle, registered No. 415 at Concarneau, was speeding down the seven kilometers of the Aven estuary on a rapid-falling tide. Owing to the force and direction of the wind it would have been a waste of time to hoist a sail, even in those reaches of the winding river where some use might have been made of it. Tollemache and Peridot (whose real name was Jean Jacques Larraidou) rigged two long sweeps, and Yvonne took the tiller, keeping the boat in mid-stream to gain the full benefit of the current. In forty minutes they were abreast of the fortlike hotel at Port Manech, the summer offshoot of the Hotel Julia, and a steel-blue line on the horizon, widening each instant, told of the nearness of the sea. It was an uneven line too, ever and anon broken by a white-capped hillock.

Peridot, pulling his oar inboard, poised himself erect for a few seconds with an arm thrown round the foremast, and gazed steadily seaward. "She'll jump a bit out there," he said; though the fierce whistling of the wind drowned his words. He was aware of that, because he converted both hands into a megaphone when he turned and shouted to Yvonne. "We'll take the inside passage, Ma'mselle."

Before attempting to hoist the foresail he rummaged in a locker and produced oilskin coats and sou'westers. There was no delay. The four donned them quickly. Yvonne had changed her Breton dress for a short skirt and coat of heather mixture cloth, because coif and collar of fine linen were ill adapted to seagoing in rough weather.

Peridot held up three fingers. The girl nodded. Peridot and Tollemache hauled at the sail, and Yvonne kept the boat in the eye of the wind until three reefs were tied securely. Then the Hirondelle swung round to her task. She careened almost to the port gunwale under the first furious lash of the gale, and a sheet of spray beat noisily on oilskins and deck. But the stanch little craft steadied herself, and leaped into her best pace.

Ingersoll dived into the cabin, and reappeared with his pipe alight, the bowl held in a closed and gloved hand. Tollemache made play with a cigarette. Peridot clambered aft to relieve Yvonne.

"We'll make Le Pouldu in little more than the hour," he said.

"It's blowing half a gale," said the girl.

"Yes. If the wind doesn't veer, we should have a record trip. But we shouldn't start back a minute after three o'clock."

"Oh, my father will see to that. Moreover, we're due at Mère Pitou's at six."

Peridot showed all his white teeth in a smile. Madeleine would be there. He meant to marry Madeleine. There was no use in asking her to wed until after the Festival of the Gorse Flowers next August, since her heart was set on being Queen. Once that excitement was ended, Heaven willing, Madeleine Demoret would become Madame Larraidou!

In taking the rudder the man was not showing any distrust of Yvonne's nerve; but there was just a possibility that a crisis might call for instant decision, when the only warning would come from that sixth sense which coastal fishermen develop in counteracting the sea's fitful moods.

Perhaps once during the hour—perhaps not once in a year—some monstrous wave would roar in from the Atlantic, seeking to devour every small craft in its path. No one can account for these phenomena. They may arise from lunar influence, or from some peculiar action of the tides; but that they occur, and with disastrous results if unheeded, every fisherman from Stornoway to Cadiz will testify. Their size and fury are more marked in a southwesterly gale than at any other time, and the only safe maneuver for a boat sailing across the wind is to bring her sharply head on to the fast-moving ridge, and ride over it. Yvonne knew of these occasional sea dragons, but had never seen one. She knew what to do too, and for an instant was vexed with Peridot. He read her thought.

"I'd trust my own life to you, Ma'mselle," he said gallantly; "but I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to you."

She smiled in spite of her pique. To make her voice heard without screaming, she put her lips close to his ear. "This time, if anybody goes, we all go," she cried. He shook his head. "No, no, Ma'mselle. The sea will never get me," he said. "Hold tight here. This is the bar."

Certainly, even among experienced yachtsmen, there would not be lacking those who might have regarded the Hirondelle's present voyage as a piece of folly. There is no wilder coast in Europe than the barrier of shaggy rock that France opposes to the ocean from St. Malo to Biarritz. At Finistère, in particular, each headland is not a breakwater, but a ruin. During heavy storms the seas dash in frenzy up a hundred feet of shattered cliff, the Atlantic having smashed and overthrown every sheer wall of rock ages ago.

Of course the adventurers were not facing a No. 8 gale. That, indeed, would have been rank lunacy. But the estuaries of the Aven and the Belon, joining at Port Manech, were sending down no inconsiderable volume of water to meet a strong wind, and the opposing forces were waging bitter war. A mile farther on a channel ran between the mainland and a group of rocks called Les Verrés. There the tide and wind would not be so greatly at variance, and the partly submerged reef would lessen the force of the sea; though the only signs of its existence were a patch of high-flung spray and a small tower, with a black buoy at its easterly extremity. This was what Peridot had called the "inside passage." To the landsman it was a figure of speech. To the sailor it meant seas diminished to half their volume as compared with the "dirt" outside.

The Hirondelle raced through the turmoil at the bar as though she enjoyed it, and, once the islets were to windward, the journey became exhilarating. None of the four people on board displayed the least concern. Indeed, they reveled in the excursion. When their craft swept into the sheltered cove at Le Pouldu, not without a tossing on another bar, and was brought up alongside the small quay, their flushed faces and shining eyes showed that they looked on the outing as a thoroughly enjoyable one.

They were ready for an early luncheon too, and did full justice to the menu. Afterward, while Ingersoll planned his picture, Yvonne and Tollemache strolled along the right bank of the Laita to the hamlet of Le Pouldu.

The girl told her companion of the singular coincidence that brought her father an unexpected commission by that morning's post; but Tollemache pooh-poohed it.

"You're becoming almost as superstitious as these Bretons," he said. "It's high time your father took you to New York for a spell. Spooks can't live there since the automobile came along. They don't like the fumes of petrol, I fancy. But these silly Bretons appeal to a saint or dread a devil for every little thing. One stained-glass proposition can cure rheumatism in a man and another spavin in a horse. It's unlucky to gather and eat blackberries because the Crown of Thorns was made out of brambles. You can shoot a wretched tomtit; but you mustn't touch a magpie. If you want to marry a girl, you pray to Saint This; if you're anxious to shunt her, you go on your marrow-bones to Saint That. I'm fond of Brittany and its folk; but I can't stomach their legends. Look at that pin-dropping business at Sainte Barbe's well! Poor Madeleine couldn't get a pin home to save her life; whereas everybody knows that she and Peridot will make a match of it before this time next year."

Yvonne did not like to hear her friends' amiable weaknesses exposed thus ruthlessly. "If Homer nods, a poor girl who has watched ever so many love affairs since A.D. 235 may surely be forgiven an occasional mistake," she said.

"Has she been at it so long? What is the yarn?"

"Please don't speak so disrespectfully of Saint Barbara. Because she wanted to marry someone whom her father didn't approve of he imprisoned her in a tower, and when she was converted to Christianity beheaded her."

"The old rascal! Did the other fellow—the one she liked—climb the tower? Perhaps that accounts for the rings."

"It is possible. I have no doubt men were just as foolish seventeen centuries ago as they are today."

"Thanks. That personal touch helps a lot. But, supposing I asked your father to sanction——"

"If you will apply the moral, I must remind you that I am to refuse my first offer. But don't let us talk nonsense. It is time we made for the harbor."

"Crushed again!" murmured Tollemache, assuming an air of blithe indifference. He was only partly successful. Stealing a glance at Yvonne, he noted her heightened color and a curiously defiant glint in her blue eyes. Unconsciously she quickened her pace too, and Tollemache interpreted these outward and visible tokens of displeasure as hostile to the notion that had sprung into thrilling life in his mind that day at Le Faouet, when he peered down into Yvonne's agonized face when he was clinging like a fly to the wall of the tower.

"She regards me as a silly ass," he communed bitterly, "and not without good cause. What place do I fill in the world, anyhow? God created me a live-wire American, and the devil egged me on to spoil clean canvas. I'm little better than a hobo, and she knows it. Well, I'll swallow my medicine.

"I say, Kiddie," he cried aloud, "you needn't go off in a huff just because I was talking through my hat. Wait till I light a cigarette."

Though he was not sure that the bantering protest had deceived her, she pretended that it had; so the object aimed at was achieved. But Tollemache was of the tough fiber that regards no sacrifice as worth while unless it is complete.

"If you knew the facts, Yvonne, you'd never get mad with me when I talk about marrying anybody," he went on. "Why do I live in Pont Aven all the year round? Because it's cheap. Last year I earned three hundred and twenty francs for three pictures. At that rate of progress any girl who married me would jolly soon starve."

Yvonne remembered the famous three. Two were portraits of the oleograph order, in which Tollemache had shamelessly flattered his sitters. For these he received the three hundred francs. The twenty were paid for a sketch of a new villa which the builder wished to send to his mother-in-law! Still, she allowed herself to be surprised.

"Of course I knew you were only joking, Lorry," she said. "And while we are on the subject, I may as well tell you that I shall never leave my father. What you say about your means is rather astonishing, for all that. How can you possibly hire autos and live as you do?"

"Oh, I don't," he explained, with a sudden grimness of tone that she had never heard before. "My father pays all my bills,—living expenses, tailors, and that sort of thing, you know. The moment I marry without his approval I revert to my pocket-money allowance."

The girl knew they were trenching again on a dangerous topic. She was so exquisitely sensitive that she felt the imminence of some avowal that it would be better, perhaps, not to hear.

"What does money matter if we are happy?" she cried cheerfully. "And our small community in Pont Aven is a very united and pleasant one, don't you think?"

"Top notch," said he. "There's Ingersoll, coming down from the front. Bet you fifty centimes he has washed in a little gem—something I couldn't touch if I tried every day for ten years!"

"Dad is really very clever," agreed Yvonne, momentarily deaf to the irony of the words. "I often wonder why he has remained in our village eighteen years. People say he would soon find a place in Paris or New York. Sometimes I fancy that my mother's death must have distressed him beyond measure. He never speaks of her, even to me. Perhaps he can't bear to revive sad memories."

"I can understand that," said Tollemache. "I believe I should go dotty if married to a woman I really loved, and I lost her."

Yvonne darted into a shop to buy caramels. She had to escape somehow. When she emerged one side of her face was bulging, and she held out a cardboard box.

"Take one," she gurgled. Not yet twenty, she was sufficient of a woman to play a part when it suited her. By the time the two had joined Ingersoll they were boy and girl again, and the curtain, lifted for an instant on a tragedy, had fallen.

Tollemache, searching for some commonplace remark to relieve the tension of his own feelings, noticed the drift of smoke curling from a cottage chimney.

"What has happened to the wind?" he said.

"It has veered to the southeast, Monsieur," answered Peridot.

"I thought something of the sort had taken place, but was so busy that I did not pay any heed," said Ingersoll. Then his forehead wrinkled reflectively. "Southeast from southwest," he muttered. "On a rising tide that change should kick up a nasty sea. Is the return trip quite safe, Peridot?"

"The sea will be a trifle worse, Monsieur; but we'll travel on an even keel."

"And be swept by an occasional wave from stem to stern?"

"I've heard of such things," grinned Peridot.

"And very uncomfortable things they are too. Yvonne, you must decide. Shall we take the rough passage, or hire the hotel auto?"

Yvonne rounded her eyes at her father, and stepped on board the Hirondelle.

He laughed. "That settles it!" he cried. "'Of Christian souls more have been wrecked on shore than ever were lost at sea.' But I warn you, my merry adventuress. Before half an hour has passed you may be ready to cry with honest old Gonzalo in 'The Tempest,' 'Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything,' obviously having the coast of Finistère in his mind."

The behavior of the maritime folk of Le Pouldu showed that there was an element of risk in the voyage. Knots of fishermen watched Peridot's preparations with a professional eye, and spat approval when he cast loose a small jibsail. A few carried interest so far that they climbed the seaward cliff to watch the boat's progress across the Basse Persac and Basse an Hiss, the two nearest shallows on the homeward line across the Anse du Pouldu.

The Hirondelle passed the bar of the Laita quickly and safely. A sea that would have smothered her in churning water broke within a boat's length. After that escape she made a drier passage than her occupants expected. She was abreast of Douélan, and Yvonne was listening to the thunder of the Atlantic on the black reef that stretches from Kerlogal Mill to Les Cochons de Beg Morg, while her eyes were watching the changing bearings of the church spires of Moëlan and Clohars, when a shout from Peridot recalled her wandering thoughts.

"There's a steam yacht out there, making heavy weather," he said.

Ingersoll had evidently noted the other vessel already, because he had gone into the cabin—not the cubbyhole of a sardine boat, but the hold converted into a saloon fitted with a table screwed to the deck, and four comfortable bunks—and reappeared with a pair of binoculars. From that moment all eyes were fixed on the newcomer.

At a guess she might be coming from Brest to Lorient, because it was safe to assume that her Captain was not a fool, and he must have started the day's run before the change of wind. It must remembered that the very conditions that helped the five-ton Hirondelle were the worst possible for the sixty- or seventy-ton stranger, hard driven into a head sea whipped by a fierce wind. She had shaped a course outside l'Isle Verte, and was well clear of the Ar Gazek shallow when first sighted by those on board the Hirondelle. The tidal stream was running strongly there, and Yvonne with difficulty repressed a cry of dismay when the yacht's bare masts and white funnel vanished completely in a cloud of spray.

"If that fellow has any sense, he'll turn while he is able, and make for Concarneau," said Peridot, as the spume dissipated, and the stricken vessel's spars came into view again.

"Perhaps he doesn't know this coast. Can we signal him?" inquired the girl.

"He wouldn't take any notice of a fishing boat. The skipper of a ten-centime steam yacht thinks more of himself than the commander of an Atlantic liner. Of course he should make Lorient tonight—if he understands the lights."

The self-confident Peridot seldom qualified his words: now he had twice spoken with an if. Yvonne hauled herself forward, and joined her father and Tollemache.

"Peridot thinks that the vessel out there may get into difficulties," she said. "I suggested that we should signal her; but he says she would pay no heed."

"What sort of signal?"

"To turn back—Concarneau for choice."

"Let's try, anyhow. Lorry, you'll find a codebook in the chart locker, and flags in the one beneath. Look for 'Recommend change of course' or something of the sort, and the Concarneau code letters. Get the necessary flags, and we'll run 'em up."

Peridot, who missed nothing, understood Tollemache's quick descent into the cabin. His shout reached father and daughter clearly.

"They're signaling from the Brigneau station already. It'll do no harm if we give him a tip too."

During the next ten minutes the situation remained unchanged, save that yacht and fishing boat neared each other rapidly, the Hirondelle traveling three kilometers to the yacht's one, while lines of flags, each identical—whereat Tollemache winked at Yvonne and preened himself—fluttered from signal station and mast. The yacht disregarded these warnings, and pressed on.

Ingersoll was watching her through the glasses; but Yvonne's keen vision hardly needed such aid.

"They must have seen both signals," she said. "There are two men on the bridge. What a big man one of them is! Can you make out her name, Dad?"

"No. I've been trying to; but the seas pouring over the fore part render the letters indistinct. You have a look. Mind you brace yourself tight against that stay."

He handed her the binoculars, and Yvonne lost a few seconds in adjusting the focus.

"The first letter is an S," she announced. "There are six. The last one is an A. Oh, what a blow that sea must have given her! It pitched on board just beneath the bridge. Why, what's the matter? She is swinging round!"

The girl was sufficiently versed in the ways of the sea to realize that no shipmaster would change course in that manner, nor attempt such a maneuver at the instant his craft was battling against hundreds of tons of water in motion.

"Gars!" yelled Peridot excitedly. "She's broken down—shaft snapped, or propeller gone!"

At once the fierce and thrilling struggle had become a disaster. The yacht was drifting broadside on, utterly at the mercy of wind and tide. Unless a miracle happened, she would be ground to matchwood on that rock-bound coast within a few minutes. Unhappily she had gained considerable speed in the direction where destruction awaited her before her crew could let go the anchor. The agonized watchers from shore and boat knew when a fluke caught in some crevice of the rocks buried twelve fathoms deep, because the vessel's bows were brought up against the sea with a jerk. Then she fell away again. The cable couldn't stand the strain. It had parted.

"Good God!" groaned Ingersoll. "Every soul on board will be drowned before our eyes!"

Yvonne could not speak. Neither could she see. She was blinded with tears. The suddenness of the affair was appalling. At one instant she had been following a fascinating fight between man and the elements, a fight in which man was gaining ground yard by yard. Now by some trick of Fate man was delivered, bound and crippled, to become the sport of savage and relentless enemies. She heard her father shouting to Peridot:

"Bear a couple of points to port. They may lower a boat."

"No use," came the answer. "Better crack on. They'll strike on Les Verrés. We may pick up one or two in the channel if they wear life belts."

Tollemache had leaped down into the cabin. He was out on deck again now, bareheaded, having discarded oilskin coat and sou'wester. A cork jacket was strapped round his tall, alert body. If any life could be snatched back from the abyss, Tollemache might be trusted not to spare himself in the effort. In that moment of stress the cheery, devil-may-care American artist had become a calm, clear-headed man of action. He looked almost heroic, standing on the sloping deck forward, with one sinewy, brown-skinned hand clasping a mast-hoop, and the other thrust into a pocket of his Norfolk jacket. By a queer trick of memory Yvonne was reminded of her fright when she saw Lorry clinging to the rings of Sainte Barbe's tower. He had come through that ordeal unscathed.

Would he conquer in this far more dreadful test? There he could depend on his own taut muscles and iron nerve. Here he was at the mercy of circumstances. Still, it was helpful to see Lorry's fingers clenched on a ring. Somehow it seemed to offer good augury.

CHAPTER III
THE WRECK

There were brave hearts, too, on board the vessel now seemingly doomed to utter destruction. Each of her two masts carried canvas, and when the cable parted a ready command had evidently sent the crew racing to cast loose both sails from their lashings. But the very trimness and tautness of everything on board proved the yacht's final undoing. Knives were brought into play, and the foresail was hoisted within a few seconds. The yacht answered her helm promptly. There seemed to be a real chance that she might haul into the wind and clear the black fangs of Les Verrés, in which case she would either run into the small estuary at Brigneau, or at the worst beach herself on the strip of sand there.

At that moment the occupants of the Hirondelle saw her name, the Stella, and they were on the point of breaking into a frantic cheer of relief when the unlucky craft crashed into a submerged rock, swung broadside on, and was saved from turning turtle only by another rock which stove her in amidships.

"Ah, Les Verrés have caught her! I thought they would. God help those poor fellows!"

It was Peridot who spoke, and the mere fact that he had abandoned hope sounded the requiem of the Stella and all her company.

Then indeed her plight was like to have passed beyond human aid. She was lodged on the outer fringe of an unapproachable reef, whence a rapidly rising tide would lift her at any minute. Being built of steel, she would sink forthwith, because her bows were crushed and plates started below the load line. She carried four boats; but, with the ingenuity of malice that the sea often displays in its unbridled fury, the two to port were crushed to splinters when she heeled over, and those to starboard, swinging inward on their davits, filled instantly, since the waves poured in cascades over the hull, as though the mighty Atlantic was concentrating all its venom on that one tiny adversary.

The marvel was that no one was swept overboard. Nothing could have saved the men on deck had the Stella lurched on to her beam ends without warning; but the fleeting interval while she was being carried round on the pivot of her fore part enabled them to guard against the expected shock. Nine figures were visible, two standing on the port rails of the bridge, and the others on the deck rails, every man having braced his shoulders against the deck itself. Masts, funnel, and upper saloon were practically vertical with the plane of the sea, and the hull quivered and moved under the assault of each wave. Yet the very injuries that would swamp the vessel instantly when she rolled into deep water now gave her a brief lease of life. The rocks that pierced the hull held her fast. Her plight resembled that of some poor wretch stabbed mortally who breathes and groans in agony, only to die when the knife that causes his distress is withdrawn.

The horror of the sight brought a despairing cry to Yvonne's lips. "Peridot, Peridot, can nothing be done?" she shrieked, turning to the Breton sailor as though, at his prayer, the sky might open and Providence send relief.

The boat was now nearly abreast of the wreck, and running free before the wind. The girl's frantic appeal seemed to arouse the three men from a stupor of helplessness.

"Look out, everybody!" shouted Peridot. "We're going head on."

It was a dangerous maneuver in a heavy sea; but fortune favored the Hirondelle in so far that no mountainous wave struck her quarter as she veered round. All were equally alive to the possibility of disaster. Ingersoll, though he uttered no word till the boat had reversed her course, was almost moved to protest.

"We are powerless," he said, coming aft to make his voice audible. "Even if some of the yacht's people are swept clear of the reef, they will be smothered long before they drift in this direction. The thing was so unexpected that none of them has secured a cork jacket, or even a life belt."

"There is one chance in a hundred, Monsieur," said Peridot, speaking so that Ingersoll alone could hear. "The point is—will you take it? You and Monsieur Tollemache would agree, of course. Will you risk Mademoiselle's life as well?"

"A chance? What sort of chance?"

"I know every inch of Les Verrés. A little inlet, not much longer than the yacht, and perhaps forty feet wide, runs in from the south just where she lies. Her hull and the reef itself form a breakwater. We can make it, and get a line aboard."

"Then for the love of Heaven why wait?"

"One moment, Monsieur. We have yet a second or two for decision. You see how the wreck lifts each time a sea hits her. The tide is rising. If she shifts when we are in there, goodby to the Hirondelle!"

The eyes of the two met, and Ingersoll wavered, but only as a brave man takes breath before essaying some supreme test of hardihood.

"My daughter would never forgive me if she knew I chose the coward's path," he said. "Go ahead, Peridot! Tell us what we have to do, and it shall be done."

A cheerful chuckle was the Breton's answer as he thrust the tiller over to port and sent the boat reeling on the starboard tack. Once she was fairly balanced, he began to bellow instruction.

"Within a couple of minutes I'll put her head on again, and we'll drift alongside the ship yonder. Monsieur Ingersoll and Monsieur Tollemache will each take a sweep, and fend the after part off the rocks. Mademoiselle will remain for'ard, and be ready to drop the anchor as a last resource if I find the tide running too strong for the sweeps to hold us back. Leave the rest to me!"

It is a glorious heritage of the English-speaking race that the men of other nations regard sea valor as the birthright of its sons and daughters. Peridot had stated the case for and against the attempted rescue to Ingersoll as a father. When the die was cast, the decision made, he counted on ces Américains acting with the same cool heroism he would himself display.

The Hirondelle quickly reached the position from which the Breton judged it possible to drop into a natural dock, the existence of which he had learned when catching lobsters and crabs. Wind and tide carried the boat swiftly backward. At first it seemed that she was simply rushing to destruction, and every eye was bent on the swirling maelstrom toward which she was speeding rather than on the stricken yacht. Even Peridot's face paled beneath its bronze, and he had a hand uplifted as a warning to Yvonne to be ready instantly with the anchor, while Ingersoll and Tollemache were standing, each with a long oar couched like a knight's lance, when the Hirondelle swept past the bows of the wreck; only to be checked immediately by a backwash from the higher part of the reef.

"Dieu merci!" sighed Peridot, jubilant because his faith was justified. "Keep her steady now, mes amis, and with God's help we'll succeed!"

A tremendous sea dashed over the Stella, and for one appalling moment it appeared that she must roll bodily into deep water, and involve the Hirondelle in her own ruin. But she settled again, with a rending of her framework and inner fittings that was sweetest music in Peridot's ears, since it meant that she was becoming wedged more firmly on the teeth of the rock, and, owing to her construction, possessed no natural buoyancy to be affected by the rising tide.

Already he had a coil of rope in his right hand, and was yelling orders to the crew of the Stella. The noise of the seas pounding on Les Verrés was deafening; but a hoarse cry from one of the men on the bridge penetrated the din:

"No comprenez! Heave away!"

So they were English or Americans—which, none could tell. Even at a distance of fifteen feet or thereabouts it was hardly possible to distinguish nationality by facial traits owing to the torrents falling continuously over the rounded hull, the smoke pouring from the funnel, the flapping of the loosened sails, and the clouds of spray that lashed the Hirondelle. At any rate, Tollemache, deciding instantly, as was his way, sent back an answering shout:

"Haul in twenty feet of the rope when it reaches you, make fast, and throw back the loose end. You must get across as best you can. No time to rig a safer tackle."

"Ay, ay, Sir!" was the reply.

"Heave away, Peridot!"

Tollemache, though not neglecting his special duty, spared one glance over his shoulder; but the rope did not undertake its spiral flight at once. The resourceful Breton awaited a momentary lull in the wind. Then the heavy coil was flung, and fell into the hands of one of the men on the bridge. As he was securing it to a stanchion, his companion, he whose gigantic stature had first caught Yvonne's attention, climbed into the tiny wheelhouse, and reappeared almost immediately, carrying a woman in his arms.

The sight caused a fresh thrill on board the Hirondelle. Somehow it was totally unexpected.

"Fools!" said Tollemache, meaning, no doubt, that men might, if they chose, venture their lives in fair fight against the storm gods, but they had no right to subject a woman to the ordeal.

Ingersoll overheard, and understood. He even smiled. Lorry regarded Yvonne as a chum to be trusted in fair weather or foul. It did not occur to him that her father might reasonably have urged the same plea against attempting a seemingly mad and impracticable rescue.

Evidently some fierce dispute was being waged on the Stella. The other man on the bridge, who turned out to be the captain, had thrown back the rope to Peridot, and summoned all hands to gather near. Now he was urging the big man to intrust his inanimate burden to one of the sailors, but met with the most positive refusal. Every second was vital, and Peridot blazed into annoyance.

"Gars!" he roared. "If they waste time, I'll back out!"

The commander of the yacht, however, was well aware of the greatest peril which threatened now; so without more ado he steadied the giant while the latter raised the woman's body to his left shoulder, grasped the double rope in both hands, and lowered himself into the water.

The passage was not difficult. The ropes were fairly taut, and the distance between the two craft not more than sixteen feet. Indeed, such a Hercules in physique might well regard the task as a mere nothing, and he set out with quiet confidence, extending his left arm in each onward movement, and closing up with the right.

Yvonne, watching his progress, suddenly yielded to another memory of Tollemache swinging from the shepherds' hooks of Sainte Barbe's tower. Suppose the rope were to break—just as one of the rings had come away in Lorry's grip? Of course the notion was stupid. She knew that each strand of that particular rope was sound, that it might be trusted to hold the Hirondelle herself against the straining of wind and tide, let alone bear the dead weight of two people; but a woman's intuition is stronger than reason. And in this instance her foreboding came true, though from a cause that she had not foreseen.

All at once Peridot uttered a yell that degenerated into a semihysterical shriek; for temperament counts in such crises, and the Breton nature was being strung to a high pitch.

"Hold tight, all hands! Here's a tidal wave!" The monster whose coming the fisherman had feared all day was upon them before Tollemache could translate the warning. It broke against the Stella's hull, and literally dashed solid tons of water on the Hirondelle and the hapless pair now midway between the two vessels. During some seconds the stanch sardine boat seemed veritably to have foundered. Even in the convulsive and choking effort needed to cling with the strength of desperation to the nearest rope or stay, her occupants were aware that she sank appreciably beneath the sheer weight and fury of that tremendous sea.

Then their blinded eyes emerged into blessed daylight again, their lungs filled with air, the flood subsided, the Hirondelle rose, trembling like a living creature, and the wave boomed away across the half-mile of channel to tear at the rocks of Finistère in a last paroxysm.

Peridot, secure in the faith that one born with a caul could not drown, was perhaps the first to regain his senses. When he swept the water from his eyes he looked for the Stella; but that unfortunate little vessel had only been driven still more tightly into the jaws of the reef, though a great gap showed to starboard amidships. She was breaking in two.

"God be thanked for that, at any rate!" he muttered.

The concession was due to the strong commonsense of a Breton, which told him that signs and portents would prove of no avail against instant death if the Stella had rolled over. Then, having ascertained that his own people were safe, he looked for the colossus he had last seen clutching the ropes. The ropes were there; but man and woman had vanished. Something bobbed up among the spume and foam close to the Hirondelle's side. He leaned over and grabbed a huge arm. With one powerful tug he drew a body half out of the water. It was the man; but the woman had been reft from his close embrace at the moment when some chance of safety seemed to have come most surely within reach. His sou'wester cap had been wrenched off, and, even when hauling the limp body on board, Peridot knew that his quickness of eye and hand would avail naught.

He held a corpse in his grasp. The top of the unfortunate man's skull was visibly flattened, and the gray hair was already darkened by an ominous dye. In all likelihood the wave struck him when least prepared, tore his fingers from the ropes, and dashed him head foremost against the Hirondelle's timbers.

Peridot was no sentimentalist. He did not waste a needless sigh over the fate of one when the lives of many were trembling in the balance. Even when he was placing the body at Yvonne's feet, where it would be out of the way for the time, he peered up at her with a grim smile.

"Two gone, Ma'mselle," he said; "but with the help of the Madonna we'll save the rest!"

A shriek from the girl's lips, and an expression of terror in her eyes which assuredly was not there after the gallant Hirondelle had thrown off her mightiest and most vindictive assailant, told him that some worse tragedy was imminent. He turned, and saw Tollemache leaping into the frothing vortex that raged between the stern of the boat and the nearest rock. The Breton guessed instantly that the young American had seen the drowning woman. Leaving the Stella momentarily in charge of Ingersoll and Yvonne, he raced aft, and seized the sweep that Tollemache had dropped. Simultaneously his friend's head rose above the maelstrom; for the cork jacket bore Lorry bravely. He was clasping the woman's apparently lifeless form with one hand, and battling against the sea with the other when the long oar was thrust within reach, and he too was drawn to the side.

Meanwhile Ingersoll, exercising splendid self control, had not deserted his post. After the heavy backwash caused by the tidal wave, a sea had curled in from the open to fill the inlet again, and the Hirondelle was carried so near the reef that the stout oar bent under the strain of fending her off, and might conceivably have snapped had not some assistance been given by the ropes attached to the Stella. Another and more normal backwash came in the nick of time, and the boat retreated to her earlier position. Now, if the Fates were aught but merciless, there might be a breathing space.

Peridot's gray-green eyes sparkled as they met Tollemache's brown eyes, gazing up steadily from the swirl of waters.

"You all right?" he said, seizing the woman's arms.

"Why not?" said Tollemache. "Lift her aboard. Don't bother about me."

Ere Peridot had laid the dead or unconscious woman by the side of the man who had already given his life for her sake, Tollemache was on deck again, and lending a hand to the first sailor to cross by the ropes. The survivors followed rapidly, and the last to leave the Stella was her captain.

Ten men were rescued,—five sailors, including the master, two stokers, an engineer, a steward, and a passenger. The two last were in the saloon when the vessel struck, and had crawled on deck as best they could, the passenger having sustained a broken arm, and the steward a sprained ankle.

It was obvious, from the measures taken to safeguard the injured pair, that they were in urgent need of attention; but Peridot knew that the lives of all still trembled in the balance. So he bawled to Tollemache:

"Get the lady below, and as many of the others as you can pack in. During the next few minutes I want none but sailors on deck. Gars! Be quick about it too! No, don't trouble about that poor fellow. He's gone!"

Already he had cast off the ropes that formed the precarious bridge. Tollemache told the shipwrecked crew what the Breton had said, and they obeyed with the readiness of men who were aware of the paramount necessity of prompt action.

The Stella's captain had already summed up the new problem facing the Hirondelle, and issued his orders with decision. He and a sturdy deckhand helped Tollemache and Ingersoll with the sweeps, which were now to be used as oars, while the others carried the woman to the cabin, and helped their disabled shipmates to make the descent.

Yvonne, though unwilling to leave the deck until the next ordeal was ended, felt that she ought to sacrifice her own wishes to the need of a sister in distress; but Peridot settled the matter by bidding her take the tiller.

"We can't get back to the inside passage on this wind. If we tried it, Les Verrés would catch us," he said. "We'll forge out a bit with the sweeps. When clear of the yacht we'll be just clear of the reef too. When you see me begin to haul at the sail put the helm hard over for the seaward tack. We're going outside. You understand?"

"Perfectly," she said.

She ran between the four men laboring at the oars, well pleased to have a task that would absorb her mind to the exclusion of all else, and profoundly relieved because it took her away from the vicinity of the dead body. Even as the Stella's company were climbing on board she could not avoid an occasional glance at the huge and inert form at her feet. It was a dreadful thing to see the soul battered out of such a magnificent frame in such a way. Never before had she set eyes on a man of similar proportions. He was inches over six feet in height, and stout withal, so that he completely dwarfed the tall and sinewy frame of Laurence Tollemache, who hitherto had loomed as a giant among undersized Frenchmen. Oilskins and heavy sea boots added to the dead man's apparent bulk. His face, which wore a singularly placid expression, was well modeled. In youth he must have been extremely good looking; in middle age—apparently he was over fifty—he still retained clear-cut features, and strands of a plentiful crop of iron-gray hair dropped over a broad and high forehead.

The woman whom he had declined to intrust to the care of any but himself was probably his wife. Was she dead too? Yvonne wondered. It was almost equally certain that the yacht was theirs; though perhaps they might have hired it for a winter cruise in the Mediterranean by way of the Spanish coast.

These thoughts flitted through the girl's brain as she followed the last phases of the rescue. Now that her hand was on the tiller, and the open sea began to show beyond the yacht's bowsprit, her mind was occupied by the one remaining hazard to the exclusion of all else. She had every confidence in Peridot's seamanship, having been out with him many a time in weather that, if not quite so threatening as this, offered sufficient test of skill and nerve. But she knew well that once the full force of the tide was felt the oars would be useless, chiefly owing to their unwieldy length, and the doubt remained whether the Hirondelle would gain enough way to win out close hauled into deep water.

Still her heart leaped with high courage as her eyes took in the bold and striking picture presented by the deck of the fishing boat during that brief transit through broken seas. In the immediate foreground a small hatchway framed the weather-tanned faces of two men lodged in the companionway so as to avoid overcrowding the cabin. Behind were her father and the yacht's Captain at one oar, and Tollemache and a sailor at the other, pulling with the short, jerky, but powerful stroke alone possible in the conditions. Ingersoll's sallow, well marked, intellectual features were in sharp contrast with the fiery red skin, heavy cheeks and chin, bullet head, and short neck of the man by his side. For an instant the eyes of father and daughter met. He smiled encouragement, and the odd notion occurred to Yvonne that strangest of all the occurrences in an hour packed with incident was the fact that the thin hands that could achieve such marvels by the delicate manipulation of a camel's hair brush should be able to toil manfully at a cumbrous oar.

Then she looked at Lorry, and he grinned most cheerfully.

Skipper and sailor wore the stolid expression of men who didn't know, and didn't particularly care, what happened next. If anything, their watchful glances betrayed a total lack of belief in the wisdom of intrusting the helm to this slip of a girl.

Amidships, and slightly forward, Peridot was standing, both hands laced in the rope that should hoist the sail. The small jib had not been lowered. It was now flapping in the wind with reports like irregular pistol shots; but Yvonne knew it would fill and draw instantly when the tiller brought the boat's head around.

And beyond Peridot was the body of the man who had been snatched from life with such awful suddenness. The broad back and slightly outstretched legs kept it motionless no matter how the deck tilted; but the front skirts of the oilskin coat crackled noisily in the gale, and a lock of hair, though soaked and thick with salt, freed itself from the clammy forehead, and moved fitfully in every gust.

The artist instinct in the girl's heart dominated every other emotion at that moment. She felt that she could transfer this somber scene to canvas if she was spared. And what a study of action it would make! What staring lights and shadows! What types of character! The four men in strenuous effort, the anxious faces peering from the semiobscurity of the hatch, Peridot's sturdy figure braced for prompt and fierce endeavor, the still form with sightless eyes peering up at the sky, and all contained within the narrow compass of the deck, with the boat's prow now cutting the horizon, now threatening to take one last horrific dive into a wave overhanging it like a moving hillock! Beyond were a slate-blue sea flecked with white and scurrying clouds tipped with russet and gold by the last beams of a wintry sun.

All this, and more, Yvonne caught in one wide-eyed glance. She saw every touch of color, every changeful flicker of light on the wet deck and glistening oilskins. Tollemache alone supplied a different note. The light brown squares of the cork jacket, and the dust-colored canvas straps that clasped it to his body, stood out in marked relief. He, who had been overboard and submerged for a few seconds, looked bone dry. The others, wet as he no doubt, Ingersoll alone excepted, seemed to have come straight from the depths.

But Peridot, watching the sea with sidelong glance, suddenly bent in a very frenzy of exertion, and Yvonne, thrusting her right foot against the low gunwale, put the tiller to port and leaned against it until her left knee touched the deck. The men at the oars imitated her as best they might, while striving to keep the boat moving.

At the first mighty pull of the partly raised sail the Hirondelle flinched and fell back a little. Then she took hold, as sailors put it, and careened under the strain until the iron socket on the starboard sweep was wrenched off its pin, and Tollemache and the sailor were hard pressed to keep it from swinging inboard and dealing Yvonne a blow. Something black and sinister showed for a second in the yeasting froth beneath the boat's quarter; whether rock or patch of seaweed none could tell, though five pairs of eyes saw it.

Peridot's call came shrilly, "Keep her there, Ma'mselle!" Back swung the tiller, and Yvonne "kept her there," though during a long minute the Hirondelle tore at the rudder as a startled horse snatches at the bit, and it seemed as if she must capsize without fail.

Again the Breton's cry rang out, "Ease her now, Ma'mselle!"

The boat fell away before the wind. Soon she was on an even keel, save for the unavoidable rolling and pitching that resulted from the furious seas. But, if stout canvas and trustworthy cordage held, they were safe as though tied to the quay in the land-locked harbor at Pont Aven. Already Les Verrés were a furlong or more in the rear. It was impossible to see what had become of the Stella, because the spray was leaping high over the reef, until its irregular crests were bitten off by the gale. But a fishing smack which had gallantly put out from Brigneau was signaled back before it crossed the bar, and the signal station was hoisting a fresh set of flags which spelled in the lingua franca of the ocean, "Well done, Concarneau 415!" which was as near the Hirondelle's name as the watchers on shore could get on the spur of the moment.

Peridot paid Yvonne the greatest of all compliments by not coming aft to relieve her. But her father, who had betrayed no flurry even when death seemed unavoidable, drew near, and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"You're another Grace Darling, my dear!" was all he said.

But the look accompanying the words was enough, and the girl's eyes began to smart painfully, because the sudden moisture in them revealed how they had suffered from the spindrift.

And again, by sending her below on an errand of mercy, he only added subtly to Peridot's tribute.

"We can spare you now, Yvonne," he said. "Tell those men to come on deck, and you give an eye to the lady. You have some dry clothes down there. If she has no bones broken, she will recover more quickly in a warm bunk than under any other conditions. Get her undressed, and give her a little cognac. Take some yourself,—don't spare it,—and pass the bottle up here."

He took her place at the tiller, and she made off at once, only pausing to pat Lorry's wet and shaggy head.

Six men came up the companion stairway; but two returned at her call to lift the injured men into a lower and an upper bunk on the same side. They had contrived already to bandage the broken arm with handkerchiefs. The sprained ankle they could not deal with. The man with a broken arm was making some outcry; but the other sufferer was patient and even smiling.

"Gawd bless yer, Miss!" he said to Yvonne when he discerned her identity in the dim light of the cabin. "If it 'adn't a been fer you an' yer shipmites, we on the Stella 'ad as much chawnce as a lump o' ice in hell's flimes!"

The Cockney accent was new in Yvonne's ear, and its quaintness helped to soften the speaker's forcible simile.

"You'll soon be all right," she assured him. "We'll reach Pont Aven within the hour, and the good folk there will look after you splendidly. Please lie still now, as I must pin a blanket across these two bunks."

Then she was left alone with the insensible woman, who was alive, the sailors said, but completely unconscious. She had fainted, they believed, when the shaft snapped and the yacht was like to be lost forthwith. The immersion in the sea seemed to have revived her for a few seconds; but she swooned off again in the cabin, and, while the boat was lurching so heavily, they thought it wiser to pillow her head on a coat and not attempt to restore her senses.

On deck the captain of the Stella had picked out Ingersoll as the probable owner of the Hirondelle. He came and stood by the artist's side.

"Is this craft yours, Sir?" he inquired.

"Yes."

"And is that young lady your daughter, Sir?"

"Yes."

"Well, I need hardly say that we owe our lives to her, and you, and your two friends. I've seen some rum things durin' thirty years at sea; but I've never seen anything to ekal your pluck in runnin' into that death trap. And that girl of yours—the way she behaved! Well, there! I never could talk much. This time I'm clean stumped!"

"We did what we could. The real credit for your rescue lies with that cool-headed Breton fisherman yonder. Is the poor fellow who was killed the owner of the Stella?"

"Yes, Sir."

"And the lady is his wife?"

"Yes, Sir. Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Carmac. Look out, Sir! You must ha forgotten you were leaning against the tiller."

The sailor acted promptly in bringing the Hirondelle back on her course; but, owing to her quickness in answering the helm, she had swung round a couple of points when an involuntary movement, a sort of flinching on Ingersoll's part, caused her to change direction.

Peridot came aft, smiling and debonair. "We're all a bit shaken, Monsieur," he said, noting the increased pallor of Ingersoll's ordinarily rather delicate-looking face. "A tot of cognac, eh? That's what we want. What do you say, Monsieur?"

The bluff English skipper had caught the key word of the sentence, and the Breton's merry eye supplied a full translation.

"Good for you, my hearty!" said he. "Gimme one fair pull at a bottle of decent stuff now, an' I'll load you to the bung with the same once we're ashore."

CHAPTER IV
THE HOME-COMING

Peridot had stipulated that the Hirondelle should start on her homeward run "not a minute later than three o'clock." He had cast off from the wharf at Le Pouldu slightly before that hour; but the wreck of the Stella and its attendant circumstances—not least being the necessity enforced by the change of wind to take the deep-sea course after leaving the reef—cost a good deal of time. As a consequence daylight had almost failed before the bar of the Aven was crossed.

On Pointe d'ar Vechen, within thirty feet of the Port Manech Hotel, stands a tiny lighthouse which sheds a mild beam over the entrance to the estuary. It is essentially a harbor light. A broad white band covers the safe channel extending from Les Verrés to l'Isle Verte, a red sector forbids the former, and a green one indicates the narrow inside passage between reef and mainland.

In crossing the bar, of course, each color became visible in turn. Ingersoll had seen the light scores of times. Never a week passed in summer that he did not spend a day, or even three days, at sea with the fishermen. His studies of the sardine fleet, in particular, were greatly in request.

Yet on this night of nights, when the return to his beloved Pont Aven might well be reckoned the close of the most notable achievement of his whole life, he seemed to have collapsed physically and mentally. His eyes had a vacant look. Their wonted expression of a somewhat sarcastic yet not intolerant outlook on life had fled for the hour, and he peered at the Breton and the sailor as though he had never before seen either. His slight but usually alert and wiry frame appeared to have shrunk. He remained deaf to Peridot's suggestion as to the brandy, and became curiously interested in the red gleam of the lighthouse which came in sight just before the bar was reached.

The Breton imagined that his employer's bodily resources had been unduly taxed. Catching the eye of the yacht's skipper (whose name, by the way, was William Popple), he nodded toward the tiller, pointed straight ahead, and held up a finger. "Wan mineet," he said.

Captain Popple was not to be outdone in linguistic amenities. "Comprenny," he grinned, and took control.

Peridot thrust his head into the hatch. "Ma'mselle," he said, "these poor devils' teeth are chattering with the cold. Will you pass the cognac?"

Yvonne felt the urgency of the request. Nearly every man was wet to the skin, and the wind bit keenly. She abandoned her nurse's work for the moment, opened a locker, and produced a bottle of generous size.

"Here you are," she said. "See that a little is left. I have given some to the men, and I hope my other invalid will soon be able to take a small quantity."

The fisherman removed a plug which had replaced the ordinary cork, and handed the bottle to Captain Popple. The brandy was a fine old liquor, brown, and mellow, and smooth to the palate, and Popple took a draft worthy of a Russian grand duke.

"Gosh!" he said, passing the bottle to Ingersoll, "that's the stuff! It warms the cockles of yer heart."

Ingersoll swallowed a mouthful. It seemed to restore his wits. The eye of the lighthouse had changed from red to green. "It is singular," he said, "how a quality of evil can be associated with certain colors. Red means danger and possible death, while green implies a jealous love perilously akin to hate."

He had not the least notion of the incongruity of such a remark just then. He might have been making conversation for some boarding-school miss whom Yvonne had brought on a summer cruise.

The other man, puzzled, stared stolidly into the gathering gloom.

"When you're plashin' at sea on a dark night you find them colored sectors mighty useful, Sir," was all he could find to say.

Ingersoll roused himself, as though from sleep, and indeed he had been wholly unconscious of his surroundings during the last few minutes. "Oh, doubtless," he said apologetically, "I was thinking aloud, a foolish habit. You were telling me about the owner of the Stella. Carmac is the name, I think? I knew a Walter H. Carmac many years ago. He was very tall, but slightly built. Surely a man cannot change his physique so markedly in the course of, say, twenty years!"

"Well, as to that, Sir, on'y the other day I was talkin' of Mr. Carmac's size to Mr. Raymond, the gentleman with the broken arm (Mr. Carmac's secretary, he is), an' he said the guv'nor used to be thin as a lath once. P'raps it was a case of laugh and grow fat. Very pleasant gentleman, Mr. Carmac was; an' his lady too—one of the best. Excuse me, Sir, but I couldn't help starin' at your girl. She's that like Mrs. Carmac it's surprising. If anyone said they was mother an' daughter, I'd agree at once—if I didn't know different."

There was a pause. Peridot had intrusted the supply of brandy to Tollemache for further distribution. He came aft now, as careful piloting would soon be needed.

"Once we're inside, Monsieur," he said, "we'll set the men at work by turns with the sweeps. That will drive the chill away."

Ingersoll explained the scheme to the skipper, who gave it his hearty approval.

"Did the yacht belong to Mr. Carmac?" went on the artist.

"Yes, Sir. He bought her a fortnight ago. She used to be Lord Aveling's Nigger; but Mr. Carmac didn't like that name, and changed it to the Stella, after his wife's Christian name."

"He didn't care to sail in a yacht called the Nigger, eh?"

A bitterness of aloes was in the words. Apparently they suggested some unpleasing notion to Popple, who branched off to another topic.

"I've a sort of idea his heart was affected," he said. "I know that some bigwig of a London doctor recommended a long voyage, and Mr. Carmac bein' several times a millionaire he just up and grabbed the first suitable craft that offered. Wouldn't wait for a survey. Took everything for granted; though I warned him that white paint may cover a lot of black sins. He an' the missis had planned a regular tour in the Mediterranean, goin' from Gib to the Balearics, and dodgin' in and out of ports all along the north coast until we brought up at Constantinople sometime in April. I advised him to let me meet him at Gib or Marseilles; but he was one of the men who will have their own way, and nothin' would suit but that he should come straight aboard. We left Southampton Tuesday evenin', and made Brest yesterday afternoon. Today we were for callin' at Belle Isle and berthin' at Lorient; but the foul weather met us, an' he was half inclined to put in at this very place we're headin' for,—Pont Aven is the name, isn't it?—on'y poor Mrs. Carmac wouldn't hear of it. She said Belle Isle was no distance, an' made out she was a good sailor—which was hardly correct, because she was ill as could be for the last two hours."

"Why didn't you turn back?"

"There was no turnin' back about Mr. Carmac, Sir. He wasn't built that way, bein' a sure enough American. Though I've never known anybody more devoted to his wife than he was, he ought to have let a younger man take her across to your boat. Not as I mean to argy that anyone could have held up against that sea. Lord love a duck! it was a oner an' no mistake! But there, what has to be will be. Poor Mr. Carmac was fated to hand in his checks on the coast of Finistère, an' we others weren't, and that's all there is to it; though I'd be flyin' in the face of Providence if I didn't say in the same breath that if four of the pluckiest and best hadn't been aboard this 'ere craft, none of our little lot would ever have seen daylight again."

Tollemache joined them. He had just exchanged a word with Yvonne, who had evidently placed her guest in a bunk, because the gleam of an oil lantern came through the open hatch, and, like the good yachtswoman she was, she had passed out the side lights trimmed and ready for use.

"Well, Ingersoll," he said cheerily, "how are you feeling now?"

"Rather tired," was the unexpected answer.

"I'm not surprised at that. You've had a pretty strenuous time."

"Of course you, Lorry, have had the day of your life!"

"Y-yes. I wouldn't go through it again, though, for a small fortune; that is, with Yvonne on board. It was nip and tuck when we were jammed up against the reef."

"It didn't take you long, Sir, for all that, to jump in after Mrs. Carmac," said Popple.

"Oh, is that the lady's name? What a weird specimen one of your sailormen must be! I asked him the name of the yacht's owner, and he didn't know it."

"If it's the beauty I saw you talkin' to, the swine didn't know his own name when he kem aboard at Southampton," snorted Popple indignantly. "Sink me! I've never seen a man so loaded. Took me for his long-lost uncle. Me, mind you! If I hadn't been rather short-handed, I'd have run him ashore to find an uncle in a policeman."

"He is sober enough now," laughed Tollemache. "I had some difficulty in persuading him to take a sip of brandy. He said he was a teetotaler."

"He what? Which one?"

"That fellow there, leaning against the mast."

"Of all the swabs! Look here, Sir, you come with me an' listen!"

"But I don't want to get the poor chap into a row."

"There'll be no row. Just language! It'll be a treat."

Tollemache, an overgrown schoolboy in some respects, accompanied Popple gleefully. Broken scraps of the skipper's comments boomed back to Ingersoll's unheeding ears.

"Guess you signed the pledge when the shaft snapped.... Coughin' up stale beer all Tuesday night, an' all nex' day made you feel you weren't fit to die on a Thursday.... You can't run a bluff of that sort on Saint Peter. He'd smell your breath a mile off, an' say, 'To the devil with any Jack who can't take his liquor decent-like when he's paid off without fillin' up when he's signed on!'...You struck a wrong job in goin' to sea. You ought to be a brewer's drayman."

"Peridot," said Ingersoll suddenly, "you saw something of the lady's state of collapse when you pulled her on board. She is not likely to recover her senses before we reach Pont Aven?"

"No, Monsieur, I think not. Women are marvels at times; but this one may not even live. Mademoiselle Yvonne is doing what she can——"

"I know, I know! Now do me a great favor. When we berth at the quay Mademoiselle and I will slip away quietly in the confusion and darkness. See to it that none of the strangers learns our name. I'll warn Monsieur Tollemache myself. Get all these people to Julia's. Tell her that the lady, Madame Carmac, is very wealthy, and that the man with the broken arm is Mr. Carmac's secretary; so every sort of expenditure will be met, though Julia's kind heart would leave nothing undone for a shipwrecked crew if they were paupers. There may be some inquiry about Mademoiselle Yvonne; but refer to her only by her Christian name, and say she lives at Madame Pitou's."

"Oui, M'sieu'." Peridot promised willingly enough. Nevertheless he was obviously bewildered.

"I ask this," explained Ingersoll, "because my daughter and I will depart for Paris by the first train tomorrow. You see, by extraordinary mischance, this Mr. and Mrs. Carmac and I were not on good terms years ago, and I don't wish old scores to be reopened."

"Gars!" spat Peridot. "You're not leaving Pont Aven because we pulled these fools off Les Verrés?"

"No, no. I need a little holiday, and I'm taking it now. That is all. We shall come back to the old life—never fear."

"You mean that, M'sieu'?"

"I swear it."

"Of course, M'sieu', you understand that I cannot silence the tongues of the whole town?"

"I don't care what anybody hears tomorrow. Remember, if poor Madame Carmac dies, no other person will have the slightest interest in my whereabouts. If she lives, and is able to travel, she will certainly endeavor to get away from Pont Aven as speedily as possible. Peridot, it is Yvonne I am thinking of, not of myself."

"Monsieur, you can count on me absolutely."

"And not a word of this to a soul?"

"Cré nom! I'll lie like a gendarme, even to Madeleine."

"But you need not lie at all. Simply forget what I have told you—as to my reason for tomorrow's journey, I mean."

"Monsieur, it is forgotten already."

Tollemache came, chuckling. "Sorry you missed the skipper's homily, Ingersoll," he said. "I laughed like a hyena. I hope the people in the cabin couldn't overhear me. By Jove! to tell you the truth, I didn't even remember that there was a dead man aboard."

"The best tragedies indulge in a what is called 'comic relief'," said Ingersoll dryly. "Give Yvonne a hail, will you? I want a word with her."

Tollemache stooped to the hatch. "Yvonne!" he said.

"Yes," came the girl's voice.

Her father, intent on its slightest cadence, deemed it placid and self-possessed.

"Socrates wants you."

Socrates was a title conferred on Ingersoll by his artist friends owing to his philosophic habit of mind. Nothing disturbed him, they vowed. Once, when the queer little steam tram that jingles into and out of Pont Aven four times daily was derailed, some alarm was created by the fact that Ingersoll, though known to be a passenger, was missing. When found he was perched on the side of the overturned carriage in which he had been seated. On climbing out through a window he discovered that from this precise locality and elevation he obtained a capital view of a wayside chapel; so he sketched it without delay. The chance, no less than the point of view, might not offer again!

Yvonne appeared, her head and shoulders dimly visible in the frame of the hatch. "What is it, Dad?" she inquired.

"We're in the river now, Dearest, and I thought you might join us on deck. You have done all that is possible, I'm sure."

"I simply cannot desert that poor woman until she shows some signs of returning consciousness."

"Oh, is she still insensible?"

"Yes. If only I could get her to swallow a little brandy."

"Well, she will be in the doctor's hands soon. Better leave matters to him."

"But one must try."

"Of course. If you prefer remaining below——"

"Father dear, what else can I do?" She vanished again.

Ingersoll, having ascertained exactly what he wished to know, sighed in sheer relief, and turned to Tollemache. "Lorry," he said, "have you a dry cigar in your pocket? How stupid of me! You're soaked through and through. I hope none of us picks up a stiff dose of pneumonia as the sequel to today's excitement. Now a quiet word in your ear. Yvonne and I are going away tomorrow for a week or so."

"Going away—from Pont Aven?"

Tollemache's voice executed a crescendo of dismay; but Ingersoll only laughed, and, for the first time since that disastrous reef was left behind, his manner reverted to its normal air of good-humored cynicism.

"Why select two words from a sentence and invest them with a significance they don't possess? I put in a saving clause. A week, or even two, can hardly be twisted into a lifetime."

"Does Yvonne know?"

"No. I have decided on the journey only within the last ten minutes. We're taking a little trip to Paris solely to avoid the gush and sentiment that will flow in Pont Aven during the next few days like a river in flood. Moreover, Lorry, if you're wise, you'll come with us."

Tollemache little realized how truly spontaneous was his friend's invitation. "D'ye mean that, Ingersoll?" he said elatedly.

"Why not? Don't let any question of expense stop you. This outing will be my Christmas treat."

"Expense! Dash it all! I've money to burn. Er—that is—enough, at any rate, to afford a jaunt to Paris. When do we start?"

"Soon after seven o'clock."

"By jing! Sharp work."

"If we really intend to escape, why stand on the order of our going?"

"I'm not saying a word. You rather took my breath away at first, you know."

"You should allow for the kinks in the artistic temperament, Lorry. Enthusiasm is too often the herald of despair."

"What sort of job do you really recommend me to take up, Socrates?"

Ingersoll smiled. "I am not in the habit of dealing my friends such shrewd blows," he said. "I was talking of myself—and Yvonne. Make no mistake about her. She has a sane mind in a sound body; but the artist's nature will triumph some day, and she will surprise all of us. By the way—nothing of this project to her till I have explained it. We shall see you at Mère Pitou's, of course?"

"I've promised to shake a leg with Madame herself in a gavotte. You don't suppose that Carmac's death will interfere with the feast?"

"Why should it?" said Ingersoll coldly. "The man is an utter stranger."

Tollemache did not strive to interpret his friend's mood. In so far as it mystified him, and he gave it any thought, he assumed that the tremendous physical exertion and nervous strain of those few minutes when life or death was uncertain as the spin of a coin had affected an ordinarily even-minded disposition.

Peridot interrupted their talk by asking Tollemache to lower the sail. Coming in with wind and tide, the Hirondelle had scudded across the bar without effort. Hardly a whiff of spray had touched her deck, and pursuing waves lagged defeated in her wake.

The sweeps were manned by willing volunteers, and the wet and shivering sailors soon restored vitality by tackling the work in relays. Usually sardine boats are content to drift up the estuary on a remarkably rapid tidal stream; so the Hirondelle made a fast trip that evening. The change in the wind had blown away the clouds brought inland by the first phase of the gale. The sky was clear, and stars were twinkling through the violet haze that followed the sun's disappearance. Pinpoints of light from the shores of the narrowing inlet scintillated from Port Manech, the Château of Poulguin, and the few tiny hamlets that border the Aven. Ever the opposing cliffs grew loftier, more abrupt, more wooded, until a cluster of lighted windows and street lamps on the water's edge at the end of one of the interminable bends showed that Pont Aven was drawing near. Thereabouts the valley opened out again; though the little town itself has been compelled to lodge its "Place" and half its houses on the first easy slopes of the steepest hill in the district.

Ingersoll, who had taken his turn at the oars with the others, contrived to choke his impatience until the pollard oaks on the Chemin du Hallage silhouetted their gnarled branches against the sky. That night the weird arms, swaying and creaking in a wind that was, if anything, increasing in force, had a sinister aspect in his troubled eyes. Each oak looked like some dreadful octopus, whose innumerable suckers were searching vindictively for an unwary victim. With an effort he brushed aside the evil fantasy, and was about to summon Yvonne when a weird, uncanny, elfin shriek came from the shadow of the largest and blackest tree.

"O, ma Doue!" [Breton for "O, mon Dieu!">[ was the cry. "There he is! See him, then, my brave Jean!" Peridot's mother was greeting her son in a voice rendered eldritch by hysteria.

"Eh, b'en Maman!" the Breton shouted back. "What are thou doing there at this time of night?"

A number of running black figures appeared on the quay, an unprecedented thing, except in the conditions that actually obtained.

"Que diable!" growled Peridot, who had not bargained for a popular ovation. "They know all about us. Someone must have telephoned from the signal station at Brigneau."

He had summed up the position of affairs to a nicety. Brigneau had told the whole story to Pont Aven, and assuredly it had lost nothing in the telling. The signalers had seen every detail of the rescue through their telescopes, and were of course keenly alive to the peril into which the Hirondelle had plunged so gallantly and effectively.

The news had not long arrived; but sufficient time had elapsed that Pont Aven was stirred to its depths. Even old Madame Larraidou, crippled with rheumatism and sixty years of unremitting toil, had hobbled down to the quay to welcome her own special hero.

A dense crowd of Bretons, with a sprinkling of the Anglo-American community that remains faithful to Pont Aven in all seasons, had gathered on the broad, low, stone wharf, and surged down to the river itself on the sloping causeway provided for boats carrying passengers. Nevertheless, if the signalmen had brought about this gathering, they had also reported the presence on board the Hirondelle of three men and a woman who were badly injured; so the local gendarmes had procured stretchers, and three automobiles were in waiting.

Ingersoll, whose nerves were already on a raw edge, nearly abandoned the struggle against Fate when he saw the dense concourse of people. "Lorry," he said in an agonized tone that the younger man had never before heard on his lips, "Lorry, help me now, or I'll crack up! Jump ashore and ask those good folk to clear a path. You know what it means if we get among them. I can't stand it. I can't! Bid them let us pass, for the love of Heaven. Tell them we have to deal with death and broken limbs. You go first. They'll listen to you."

Tollemache obeyed without demur. He was completely at a loss to understand his friend's collapse; but its undoubted seriousness called for decisive action. His vibrant, ringing tones dominated the cheers that burst forth when the Hirondelle bumped into the quay.

"Mes amis," he cried, "hear me one moment, I pray you. The people we have rescued are suffering. One is dead—others are in great danger. Unless you make way, and permit us to bring the injured ones quietly and speedily to the hotel, some may die on the road."

It sufficed. The cheers were hushed. The throng yielded place without demur. A low susurrus of talk and the sobbing of women were the only sounds that mingled now with the unceasing chant of the gale.

Ingersoll had literally forced himself to stoop into the companion hatch. "Yvonne," he said in a curiously muffled voice.

"Yes, Dad," came the girl's answer.

He could not be sure, owing to his extremely agitated state, but fancied that another voice gasped a word faintly.

"Come now, Dear! Come at once!" he appealed.

Again Yvonne's head and shoulders emerged. "Oh, Dad," she almost sobbed, "Mrs.—Mrs. Carmac is conscious now. She beseeches me to remain with her until—until——."

Ingersoll literally pulled his daughter up the few remaining steps. "We are going straight home!" he cried, savagely impatient of the resistance his plans were encountering at every turn. "I am ill—nearly demented! You must come now!"

Still clasping her arm in a grip that left marks on her white skin for days thereafter, he forced her to the side of the boat.

"Father dear, of course I'll come; but you are hurting me," she said quietly. "Please don't hold me so tight."

He was deaf to her pleading. They raced together up the causeway. To avoid attracting attention, Yvonne did not endeavor to hold back, and bystanders wondered why the two made off at such a furious pace. Madame Pitou, Madeleine, and Barbe, drawn to the quay like the rest of the inhabitants, were divided between concern for father and daughter and desire to witness the landing of the shipwrecked crew.

But Mère Pitou could not contain her anxiety. "Tcha!" she cried, bustling through the crowd. "What's gone wrong with Monsieur Ingersoll and Yvonne? They might have seen the devil out yonder. I must hurry after them. I'll hear all the news later when Peridot comes."

The two girls went with her. For once feminine curiosity was less potent than sympathy. Moreover, Tollemache's announcement of a death among the rescued people had terrified them. They shuddered at the notion of the solemn procession of men carrying a limp and heavy body. The mere sight of such a thing would take the heart out of them for the evening's merrymaking.

Ingersoll had passed the first mill—or the last—that bridles the river, and was striding through the narrow street leading to the bridge, when he became conscious of the force he was exerting on his uncomplaining companion.

"I'm sorry, Yvonne," he said, freeing her arm immediately. "I forgot myself. Really I hardly know what I am doing. Am I hurting you? Why didn't you tell me?"

He spoke in a queer, choking voice which at any other time would have aroused his daughter's affectionate solicitude. That night, however, probably because she too was in an overwrought condition, she contented herself by a seemingly nonchalant reply.

"It doesn't matter, Dad. A bruise more or less, after all that we have gone through, is not of much account."

"I hurried you away——" he began; but, greatly to his surprise, Yvonne interrupted the labored explanation he had in mind.

"I think I understand, Dad," she said. "Wouldn't it be better for both of us if you left unsaid what you were going to say—at any rate, till the morning? We are—how shall I put it?—somewhat unhinged by today's events. You are weary and heartsick. I know I am. Let me go and see that Mrs. Carmac is being cared for. I'll not remain long, and we can retire soon after supper. Then, when we have slept perhaps, we shall wake into a new world with nerves not so exhausted, or strained, as at this moment."

Ingersoll, brooding on his own troubles, and feverishly eager to snatch his daughter from a soul-racking ordeal, was wholly unaware of the passionate tumult vibrating in every syllable of that appeal. He caught the sound, not the significance, of the words that irritated him.

"Now you are talking nonsense!" he cried. "You cannot possibly know what course I have decided on. It is this: I loathe the sensational element attached to such an event as the rescue we have taken part in. You hardly realize what it implies to you and me personally. Not only the French but the English and American newspapers will send here a horde of special correspondents and photographers. If we remain in Pont Aven, we cannot escape them. They will take the cottage by storm, or, if we bolt our door against intruders, we shall have to withstand a siege. To avoid this, you and I are going to Paris by the early train tomorrow. Lorry is coming too. He agrees with me—or, if I shouldn't say that—he is delighted at the prospect of the outing."

"Poor Lorry!" said Yvonne.

"Why 'poor Lorry'? He is only too pleased at being invited."

"But, Dad, he doesn't know what you and I know."

A sudden terror fell on Ingersoll. "What do you mean?" he murmured hoarsely, stopping short as though he had been struck by an invisible hand.

During a few fateful seconds father and daughter stood in the center of the four ways that meet as soon as the road from Paris crosses the Aven. No one was near. The eternal plaint of the river was drowned by the fierce wind whistling under the eaves of the old houses with high-pitched roofs, and singing an anthem of its own around the pierced spire of the neighboring church. Yvonne placed her hands on her father's shoulders, and her sweet lips quivered in an irresistible rush of agonized emotion.

"Dad," she said, striving vainly to keep her utterance under control, "if you—wish—to go to Paris tomorrow—I--shall not try—to dissuade you. But I—cannot come with you. I dare not! You see—I have just found my mother—and—she may be dead tomorrow. Oh, Dad, Dad! No matter how my mother may have erred—or what wrong she may have done you in the past—I cannot abandon her now!"

CHAPTER V
THE LIFTING OF THE VEIL

It was well that Mère Pitou came upon them before another syllable was uttered, since not all Ingersoll's philosophy could have withstood the earthquake that had destroyed in an instant the carefully constructed edifice of many years. His very soul was in revolt. Heart suggested and brain lent bitter and cruel form to rebellious words; but, such is the power of convention, the unexpected arrival of the sharp-tongued Breton woman silenced him.

"O, là là!" she cried breathlessly. "If I had known you two were making off in such a jiffy merely to stand in the Place au Beurre and look at the stars, I wouldn't have waddled after you like the fat goose that I am. What, then, is the matter? I thought you were hurrying home because you were perished with cold, and I find the pair of you stuck in the middle of the road. Monsieur Ingersoll, you at least are old enough to have more sense. Both must be soaked to the skin; yet you keep Yvonne out in this biting wind, to say nothing of a thin scarecrow like yourself!"

Yvonne had dropped her hands when she heard the approaching footsteps. Unconsciously she had raised her eyes to Heaven in agonized suppliance, and her attitude was naturally inexplicable to her Breton friends. She recovered some semblance of self control more quickly than her father.

"Madame," she said, "we were, in a sense, debating whether or not we could spare the time to change our clothes before attending to the wants of the poor people saved from Les Verrés. I think you are right. It would be foolish to take any additional risk. Come, Father dear, let me help you now."

She took her father's arm, and drew him on. He walked unsteadily, and might have fallen if it had not been for Yvonne's support. The first mad impulse that bade him pour forth a vehement protest against the injustice of Fate had died down. He was as a man stricken dumb, and even physically maimed, by some serious accident.

Mère Pitou, imagining that he was benumbed as the outcome of prolonged exposure to the elements, was minded to rate him soundly; but happily elected instead to pour the torrent of her wrath on things in general. "A nice fête we'll have, to be sure!" she began. "There was I, boiling beautiful white meat and roasting fat pullets when the news came that the Hirondelle was acting the lifeboat off Les Verrés! I thought you'd all be drowned, at the very least, and I wouldn't have been a bit surprised, because anything might happen to that light-headed Monsieur Tollemache and that grinning, good-for-nothing Peridot. Cré nom! I wouldn't have crossed the street if you two weren't aboard! And now the bottom will be burnt out of the pan, and my four lovely fowls frizzled to a cinder! Barbe, you little minx, run ahead and see that the big kettle is put on to boil! Monsieur Ingersoll and Yvonne must have hot baths, with mustard, and I'll stand over them till they swallow a good tumblerful each of scalding wine. I'll give them Les Verrés—see if I don't!"

Whereat Madame gurgled in momentary appreciation of her own wit, because verrée means "a tumblerful," and she had blundered on a first-rate pun.

"Chère maman, we are not ill, nor likely to feel any bad effects from a wetting," said Yvonne. "My father is shaken because, although successful, we have brought one dead man to Pont Aven, and perhaps a dead woman too."

"Ah, that's sad—that's dreadful!" wheezed Mère Pitou. "Poor things! Who are they?"

"An Englishman gentleman—and his wife."

"They may be Americans. We hardly know yet." Ingersoll was striving bravely to recover his poise. Those few words told Yvonne that he wished their secret to remain hidden from all others—for the present, at any rate.

"Dieu merci! You can talk, then?" said Mère Pitou tartly. "Were they coming to Pont Aven? Are they known here?"

"No. Their name is Carmac. They have never been here, I believe. They were making for Lorient; but their yacht broke down and drove on the reef. Had it not been for Peridot we could not have saved a soul on board."

"Oh, he's a good sailor—I'll say that for him. His poor old mother was there on the quay, screeching like an owl. She lost her man at sea, you know. I hate the sea. I'll skin Barbe if she ever so much as looks at a fisherman. Do you hear that, Madeleine?"

"Yes, Madame. But you can't skin every fisherman who looks at Barbe."

"Wait till I catch one at it! He'll find a shark in his nets that day. Hurry now, you, and help Barbe to get those baths ready! I filled the kettle before I came out, and lifted the wheat off, and as I shoved in the damper of the oven the fowls shouldn't have taken much harm."

"Peridot will surely come soon," Madeleine ventured to say.

Mère Pitou, having made sufficient concession to her guests' feelings by that revised estimate of the condition of the eatables, was moved to withering sarcasm.

"Why do you think that matters to me?" she cried.

Madeleine was silenced; so Madame answered her own question.

"No man with eyes like a tomcat could ever turn my head!" she snorted.

For once her gift of biting repartee served a good purpose. It effectually distracted attention from Ingersoll's half-demented state, while father and daughter were given a breathing space before plunging into an explanation that might affect the future in such wise that the stream of life would never again flow on the placid course it had followed during many happy and uneventful years.

Within the cottage, too, Mère Pitou's bustling ways interposed a further barrier. She drove the artist to his room, set Madeleine to help Yvonne undress, "and rub her till she's as red as a boiled lobster," prepared two steaming glasses of mulled wine, scolded each unwilling patient until the decoction was taken, and wanted to massage Ingersoll; an attention that he avoided only by declaring positively that he would not indulge in a hot bath at all unless she cleared out.

Luckily a wetting from salt water is seldom harmful if accompanied by exercise, and Ingersoll had never been really chilled; while Yvonne had not only kept comparatively dry, but had been shielded from the wind during the homeward voyage. When the two met in the studio, a large room that Ingersoll had built on the north side of the house, the frenzy and tumult of a tremendous discovery had died down, and each was ready to make due allowance for the other's suffering.

Yvonne wore her Breton dress, and her father had discarded his artist's clothes for a suit of blue serge. Seldom, perhaps not twice in a year, did he appear in evening dress. He shunned society, and disliked its livery. For that reason he had removed from the Hotel Julia soon after arriving at Pont Aven with Yvonne, then an engaging mite hardly a year old. Ostensibly he wanted a spacious studio; in reality he sought seclusion.

As for Yvonne, she did not even possess a dinner gown; though she and her father were often welcome guests at the houses of the small artistic coterie that makes the village its abiding place. But pictures, not fashion plates, ruled the roost therein, and no grande dame whom chance brought to these friendly gatherings could plume herself that her "Paris model" frock eclipsed the quaint charm of Yvonne's peasant costume.

The girl had grown quite accustomed to the demand invariably put forward by Ingersoll before accepting an invitation that he should be told the names of any strangers who would be present. If she gave a passing thought to the matter, she fancied that her father had early in life quarreled with his relatives, and wished to avoid a haphazard meeting with certain members of his family. Singularly enough, Tollemache, her greatest friend among the men of Pont Aven, did not conceal the fact that he too was at loggerheads with his own people. Only that day had he been on the verge of some explanation of this unfortunate state of affairs. How little did she dream then that the carefully hidden secret which led her own father to bury his talents in a Brittany fishing village soon after she was born would be dragged into light before the sun went down!

When she entered the studio she found her father seated in a roomy wickerwork chair, and gazing disconsolately into the flames of a roaring log fire. He had aged within the hour; his already slight figure seemed to have shrunk; he did not even turn his head when the door opened.

Her heart went out to him in a wave of tenderness. She dropped on her knees by his side and put her arms round his neck.

"Dad dear," she murmured, "don't dwell on our troubles tonight, great as they are. Let us rather be thankful that we were able to render some service to our fellow creatures, and that our own lives were preserved in a time of real danger. God works in His own wonderful way, doesn't He, Dear? It was His will that we should have gone to Le Pouldu today. It was surely by providential contriving that we should happen to be near the reef when the Stella struck. Something more than idle chance brought us there."

"Yes," he said, gazing into her eyes with the sorrow-laden expression of a man who sees naught but misery before him, "it was not chance, Yvonne, but the operation of a law as certain as death. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. I had almost forgotten that your mother lived. After eighteen years she was dead to me. So far as you are concerned she might as well have died in giving you birth. Then her memory would have been a blessing rather than a curse."

"Hush, Dear! She may be dying even now. No, no, Darling, you shall not say it!" and her soft lips stifled the terrible wish that his anguish might have voiced.

For a little while neither could speak. Yvonne's head bent over her father's knees, and he knew that she was crying. With a supreme effort he strove to lessen the tension.

"Come, come, Sweetheart!" he said, stroking the mass of brown hair beneath the lace coif. "You and I must face this difficulty together, or goodness only knows what may be the outcome! Tell me now, if you are able, how you learned that Mrs. Carmac was your mother."

"Oh, Dad, she recognized me at once!" sobbed the girl. "Poor thing, the warmth of the blankets and a teaspoonful of brandy I forced between her lips brought her round slowly."

"When?"

"After we crossed the bar."

"I feared as much," groaned Ingersoll.

Even in her distress Yvonne had the tact to avoid the thorny bypath opened up by her father's involuntary cry. "She sighed deeply a few times," she went on hurriedly, "and I could tell by her color that she was about to revive. At last she opened her eyes, and looked at me in a dazed way.

"'Yvonne!' she whispered.

"I was so overjoyed to find that she was not actually at the point of death that I felt no surprise. 'Yes, Dear,' I said, 'you are with friends, and that horrid wreck is a thing of the past.'

"But she continued to gaze at me as if I were a ghost. 'Yvonne Ingersoll!' she said again.

"Then it struck me as really remarkable that she should know my name. But I only asked her to drink a little more of the brandy, and rest until we reached Pont Aven.

"'Rest!' she said in quite a clear voice. 'Why should I rest when Heaven snatches me from a dreadful death and permits me to see my own daughter after eighteen years? Or is this some other world? Why am I here? Where have you come from?'

"For the moment I was sure her mind was unbalanced, and thought it best to calm her by answering truthfully. 'My mother is dead, Dear,' I said; 'but you and I are living. You hardly realize now that your yacht was wrecked on a reef near the mainland. By the mercy of Providence my father's boat was close at hand, and we rescued you.'

"'Me only?' she cried, trying to rise in the bunk, and giving me such a piercing look.

"'No,' I said, 'we took off all hands.'

"Dad dear, I simply didn't dare say that her husband alone had been killed in trying to save her; so I put it that way, hoping she would not ask me any more. But she did then succeed in lifting herself on an elbow.

"'Child,' she said, 'they must not meet! God! They must not meet!'

"'Who must not meet?' said I, feeling rather frightened, as of something unseen that threatened me in the dark.

"'Your father and Walter Carmac,' she replied.

"'If Mr. Carmac is your husband, he is still unconscious,' I assured her, catching at the first straw that offered in the whirl of things.

"'Is your father on board?' she demanded, grasping my wrist.

"'Yes,' I said.

"Then she sank back into the bunk again, as though I had struck her, and began to sob. 'Oh, it is cruel, cruel!' she wept. 'After all these years my folly has found me out! Yvonne, Yvonne, don't you understand? I am your mother! I left your father eighteen years ago. I left you, my darling little baby! I sought freedom because your father was poor, and I longed to be rich. Look at me! Look at me, I tell you! Can you deny that I am your mother?'

"Oh, Dad, I knew in my heart that she was speaking truly; but even in that moment of torture I tried to be loyal to you, and begged her to close her eyes and let me cover her with the blankets. But she only laughed, in a ghastly way that was worse than tears. Then she heard one of the men in the other bunks groaning, and started up again, asking wildly who was there. I told her that two men were badly injured, and had been brought below. Unfortunately, I added that her husband was on deck.

"'Husband!' she cried. 'I am not worthy of such a husband! I bartered my very soul for luxury, and now I am being punished as I deserve. Yvonne, one night in Paris your mother kissed you when you were lying asleep in your cot, and hurried away to what I deemed liberty. I have lulled my conscience for eighteen years into the belief that I was justified, that I had acted for the best, since my extravagant tastes were even then embittering your father's life. Yet the husband and child I abandoned have saved my miserable life, saved the man too who came into my life when I was free to marry again. Oh, why didn't you let me die? Perhaps I am dying now. Yvonne, you have my face; but a kindly Heaven must have spared you from having my nature. You, at least, will forgive. Kiss me once before the end comes. If you are merciful, an Eternal Judge may not condemn me utterly; for I have striven to atone by doing some good in the world. Unhappy myself, I have tried to make others happy.'

"Father dear, I could not refuse. I took her in my arms. I suppose she nearly fainted again, because she only spoke incoherently until she heard your voice in the hatch, when she whispered your name and buried her face in the clothes."

The girl's tremulous voice ceased, and there was no sound in the room save the crackling of elm logs and the pleasant babble of flames in the big open fireplace. At last, fearing lest he should break down completely, Ingersoll gently untwined his daughter's clasp, rose, and fumbled with a pipe,—man's sole harbor of refuge in emotional storms.

"Don't cry, Yvonne," he said brokenly. "It—it hurts. From what you tell me I gather that your—mother—is in a more critical condition than I imagined. Do you want to go to her—now?"

Yvonne too stood up. She brushed away the mist of tears, and looked at him with shining eyes. "Dad," she said, and a vibration rang in her voice that carried her father's memory back half a lifetime, back to the days when youth was golden and love was deemed everlasting, "when my mother was muttering in delirium, my own poor wits wandered. I asked myself what it all meant, and I could not escape the bitter understanding that came to me. Then I remembered what you said one day when a wretched girl had been hounded out of the village because of her transgression."

"What I said?" repeated Ingersoll, baffled in the effort to follow her train of thought.

"Yes. You were speaking to some man who was angered by the merciless attitude of the peasant women to one of their own sex. You blamed the misleading teachings of narrow-minded theologians, and reminded him of Christ's words to the Pharisees who brought before Him some poor creature who had fallen. They taunted Him with the Mosaic law, which ordered that she and her like should be pelted with stones; but He only said that the man who was without sin among them should cast the first stone. And the crowd melted, and Christ was left alone with the sinner, whom He forgave. I did not know then just what you meant. I did not know until I heard my mother confessing her fault, and asking me, her daughter, for forgiveness."

"Unhappily our everyday world is not ruled by the maxims of Christ. The girl you speak of went to Brest, and her body was found in the harbor a fortnight later."

"I remembered that too."

"If you go to your mother now, you may set in motion influences that may darken your whole life."

"If I did not go, I would never forgive myself—never!"

"Prudence, the merest sort of commonsense, warns me that we ought to get away from Pont Aven by the first possible train."

"Father dear, what did Peridot say to you before he brought the Hirondelle round into the wind off Les Verrés? I couldn't hear, of course. But do you think I could not read your face? Had you not to decide whether or not you would risk my life as well as your own? You were sure of Lorry—who wouldn't be? But it came hard to sacrifice me as well. Did you obey commonsense then? Did you even hesitate?"

Ingersoll threw up a hand in a gesture of sheer hopelessness, and pretended to search for a box of matches on the mantelpiece. "So be it!" he said wearily. "Don't think I am afraid of any rival in your affection, Yvonne. Perhaps your woman's heart is wiser than my gray head. But, mark you, I make two stipulations! No matter what transpires, you must come home before eleven o'clock; and it is impossible, absolutely impossible, that your mother and I should ever meet!"

He was choosing his words carelessly that night. How "impossible" it would have seemed that morning had some wizard foretold the events of the succeeding hours! But Yvonne also was deaf to all but his yielding. She ran to him, and drew his face close to hers.

"Dad," she said, kissing him, "you are the best and dearest man in the world. How could your wife ever have left you? If I live a hundred years, I shall never understand that."

She was going; but he stayed her.

"Yvonne, be governed by one vital consideration. Those two men in the cabin must have caught some glimmer of the truth from your mother's ravings. But they are strangers, and their own troubles may have preoccupied their minds to the exclusion of the affairs of others. The only person in Pont Aven who knows something of my sad history is Madame Pitou. She has been aware all these years that my wife was alive, or at any rate that she was living after I came here. She is certainly to be trusted. Take care that none other learns your mother's identity. I ask this for her own sake."

The girl smiled wistfully. "Yet you would have me believe you an ogre!" she said.

A few minutes later Tollemache arrived. He found his friend sitting by the fire, with a pipe that had gone out between his lips.

"Hello, Socrates!" he cried. "You're togged for the party, I see. Where's Yvonne?"

"She was unhappy because of that poor woman who lost her husband; so I let her hurry off to Julia's. They've been taken there, I suppose?"

"Yes. It was awfully distressing. Peridot carried Mrs. Carmac off the boat, and by some mismanagement the light from a lantern fell on her husband's face. Ill as she was, she realized that he was dead. She screamed something I couldn't attach any meaning to, and her cries as she was being put into the hotel auto were heartrending. By gad! a beastly experience!"

"What did she say, Lorry?"

"I hardly know. It sounded like a cry for Yvonne, and a protest against Heaven that her husband should be taken and she left. 'I am the real offender!' she said. 'The punishment should be mine, not his!' Somehow, not the sort of thing you'd expect from a distracted wife. I guess she's nearly out of her mind."

"Naturally. Think what it meant to a delicate woman to be imprisoned in that deck saloon when the yacht keeled over. You see, Lorry, we were buoyed up with the hope of being able to effect a rescue. She, on the other hand, must have gazed into the opening doors of eternity. Pull up a chair. There's time for a cigarette. Seven o'clock is the supper hour."

Tollemache obeyed. Ingersoll relighted his pipe, and the two smoked in silence for a while. Then the younger man glanced at his companion with a quizzical scrutiny that was altogether approving.

"Glad to see you've bucked up, old sport," he said. "You were thoroughly knocked out by the time we reached the quay. I know why, of course."

Ingersoll stooped to throw back into the fire a half-burnt log that had fallen out on to the hearth. "Do you?" he said calmly.

"Great Scott! I should think so, indeed! It was one thing that we three men should go into that death trap, but quite another that you should bring Yvonne into it. Bless your heart, Yvonne was watching Peridot and you, and told me what you were saying. 'Dear old Dad,' she said, 'he feels like Jephthah when he had to sacrifice his daughter.' Made me go cold all over. Gee whizz! I was pleased it wasn't I who had to make the choice between turning back and running into safety—where my sister—or my wife—was concerned."

Tollemache stammered and reddened as his tongue tripped on the concluding words; but the older man paid no heed. He was too profoundly relieved by an explanation that differed so materially from the avowal he dreaded.

"By the way, Lorry, that journey to Paris is postponed," he said after a pause.

"Good! It was hardly like you to bolt out of the place when you were most needed. Those sailormen would be at sixes and sevens tomorrow if we didn't show up."

"I must leave that part of the business to you," said Ingersoll slowly. "I mean to efface myself entirely. Indeed, I'm thinking of paying a long-deferred visit to Forbes, at Concarneau. Yvonne and you can manage splendidly in my absence. Now, don't argue, there's a good chap. I rather lost my head on being brought into contact with two people with whom I quarreled years ago; or, to be precise, my animus was not against the poor fellow who is dead. Of course his wife is bound to recall the facts, and it would place her in a difficult position when she discovered that I was one of her rescuers. Women are apt to form curious notions about such matters. It was an extraordinary misfortune, to say the least, that her husband should be the one man whom we failed to save. I think you follow me?"

"Oh, yes—the irony of Fate, and that sort of thing," said Tollemache with an air of wisdom. He was convinced that he understood the position exactly.

Ingersoll stood upright, drew in a deep breath that was curiously like a sigh, and tapped his pipe against the stone pillars of the fireplace. "I hear sounds of revelry by night," he said. "Herri has arrived with the bagpipes."

"Dash it all!" growled Tollemache. "I don't feel a scrap like dancing this evening. That unhappy woman's shrieks are still ringing in my ears."

"We must adjust ourselves to the conditions," said Ingersoll quietly. "Life, like art, is a matter of light and shade. Each of us sails a tiny craft through an unknown sea, and if we can give a brother or sister a cheery hail—why, let us do it, though our own vessel be sinking steadily. I'm in no mood for revel,—goodness knows!—but, with Yvonne absent, you and I must help Mère Pitou to entertain her guests. Some excellent folk are coming here from Nizon and Nevez. Her sister is driving in from Riec. You'll hear some real old Breton ballads tonight. Pity Yvonne isn't here to translate them. My acquaintance with the language is limited; but Madeleine or Barbe will tell you the drift of the words."

"Won't Yvonne be here later?" inquired Tollemache, striving to cloak his disappointment.

"I'm inclined to think she will remain with Mrs. Carmac till eleven or thereabouts."

"But the doctor is there—and a nurse."

"Unless I am greatly mistaken, Mrs. Carmac will prefer Yvonne to any nurse. There is a cousinship of nationality, you know. Now, Lorry, no grumbling. Let's make the best of things."

A knock at the door heralded the entrance of a dozen or more smiling and self-possessed Bretons. The studio was the only room in the house large enough to hold the company that would gather within the next few minutes. The living room was packed with tables and chairs; hence, on fête days, Ingersoll's quarters were invaded.

The artist was acquainted with everyone present, and Tollemache was no stranger to the majority. Nearly all were of the well-to-do yeoman class; for Mère Pitou belonged to an old family, and her husband, a farrier, had been well thought of in Pont Aven. Men and women wore the national costume, and appeared that evening in grand state. The women's full-skirted dresses were of black cashmere, trimmed and slashed with deep bands of black velvet; but this somber setting was merely a foil to aprons and overbodices wrought in gold, silver, and bright-hued silk threads, the whole blended in pretty designs with an oriental lavishness of color and sheen.

The coifs, though bearing a general similarity of design, varied for each district. The abundant and jet-black hair of these Breton dames and demoiselles was waved over the forehead and coiled somewhat toward the back of the head. Round the twisted tresses was placed, in the first instance, the petite coiffe, a stiff white linen band three inches deep, which, pinned securely, served as the basis of a dainty superstructure. A strip of silk ribbon, cream, pink, or light blue, hid the petite coiffe, and showed its tint through the meshes of the coronet of fine lace and cambric forming the grande coiffe, with its coquettish white streamers falling below the neck.

Round the throat, and deeply cut, was the broad linen collar, highly starched, and so wide that its wings projected over the shoulders, leaving a space across the top of the breast to reveal the lace edging of an underbodice. These collars would puzzle any laundress who was not a Bretonne if she were asked to prepare them, because their graceful curves, molded to the slope of the shoulders and the straight line of the back, are obtained by a process of wrinkling, or furrowing, effected by the use of long straws when the linen has been lightly ironed when it is still damp and pliable.

Age does not affect the style of dress. The girl of eight is attired exactly like her grandmother, the only variation being seen in the shoes, the younger people mostly donning white doeskin, and the older ones black patent leather with silver buckles.

The men too, without exception, wore tight-fitting gray trousers, short jackets of black cloth, with tabliers of black velvet and ornamental buttons. Some dandies affected gold, silver, and colored silk embroidery down each side of the front of the jacket. Their hats were low-crowned, black felt wideawakes, with heavy bands of black velvet, carrying showy buckles of silver on a rosette.

A more light-hearted, jovial, and picturesque company it would be difficult to find, or, considering its nature, one more expensively dressed. (Strangers, especially of the fair sex, who decide to purchase "a Brittany costume" for the next fancy dress ball, are likely to be unpleasantly surprised when they inquire the price. The materials are invariably the best of their kind, and the lace and embroidery are handworked. Naturally one such outfit lasts several years.)

Ingersoll moved among these free-mannered, laughter-loving folk as though he had not a care in the world. Some notion of the disaster to the Stella had spread, and he was called on for particulars, which he gave in sufficient detail. The men appreciated the peril from which the Hirondelle had extricated herself, the women were prodigal of their sympathy with the American woman who had lost her husband. Tollemache, listening to his friend's easy flow of talk, wondered more than ever what sort of nervous attack it was that induced that amazing display of terror at the moment of landing.

Supper was ended when Peridot put in an appearance. His face was flushed, and his gray-green eyes had acquired a rather suspicious luster. In a word. Captain Popple had discovered the excellence of liqueur brandy, and Peridot, ordinarily an abstemious fellow, had proved himself a less seasoned vessel than his host.

Madeleine was the first to notice his condition, and it troubled her. She rather avoided him, and as a consequence he affected a loud-voiced and boisterous good-humor.

"Gars!" he cried, seizing the opportunity when the girl refused to dance the gavotte with him. "Where is Yvonne? She can foot it better than any of you."

Now he had never before alluded to Yvonne by her Christian name. While the Bretons are not toadies, they are polite, and the artist's daughter ranked as an aristocrat in the village. An awkward silence fell. Even Ingersoll shot an inquiring glance at the fisherman.

"Mademoiselle Yvonne is at the Hotel Julia," said Mère Pitou. "Pity she didn't see you as she was going."

"Why?" grinned Peridot.

"Because you might have known then how to address her. By this time you seem to have forgotten."

"Que Diable! I meant no offense, Madame. I suppose she's looking after the lady who claimed her as a daughter."

"What sayest thou, Imbecile?"

"Fact," said Peridot, with drunken gravity. "I asked a man who speaks English what the lady was screaming as I tucked her into the auto, and he told me——"

"Larraidou," broke in Ingersoll, pallid with sudden anger, "you had better go home."

Then Peridot too flared into wrath. "What have I done wrong?" he cried. "Cré nom! they're as like as two peas in a pod! Come, now, Monsieur—is there any harm in saying that?"

Ingersoll turned to Tollemache. "Lorry," he said, "oblige me by taking our talkative friend to his house. He will be glad of it in the morning."

So, protesting loudly that some people made a lot of fuss about nothing, Peridot vanished with a shattered halo. But the mischief had been done. Next day all Pont Aven would be discussing Mrs. Carmac's strange delusion. In the view of the one man who knew the whole truth, it was the beginning of the end.

CHAPTER VI
A LULL

Peridot lived on the Toulifot, a steep and rocky road that once upon a time was Pont Aven's main avenue to the interior of France. On the way he was consumed with maudlin sorrow that his beloved patron, Monsieur Ingersoll, should have forbidden him to take further part in the feast.

"Tell me, then, what was my fault," he protested to Tollemache. "Name of a pipe! can't a fellow take a thimbleful of cognac to keep the cold out?"

"Thimbleful!" laughed Tollemache. "The sort of thimble you used would make a hat for any ordinary head."

"The skipper of the Stella is a bon garçon, and showed his gratitude," said Peridot. "I could have carried the liquor like a drum major if I hadn't fasted at Le Pouldu so as to keep a good appetite for supper."

"Ah! That's it, is it? Well, I'll make matters straight with Monsieur Ingersoll in the morning."

Tollemache had every reason to believe that the fisherman was speaking the truth. He had not seen Peridot intoxicated during five years of fairly close acquaintance.

"The worst thing is that Madeleine will be holding her nose in the air every time she meets me for a month," came the dejected whine.

"I'll tell her too how the accident happened. You'll be joking about it yourself tomorrow, old fellow."

"Tiens! I've got it," and Peridot stood stock still in an attitude of oracular gravity. "Monsieur Ingersoll was angry, not because I was a trifle elevated, but on account of what I said about Ma'mselle Yvonne. Queer thing if that lady should really be her mother!"

"Now I know for certain that you're drunk as an owl."

"Not me! Gars! Funny things occur. I could say lots if I chose. Why does Monsieur Ingersoll encourage Ma'mselle to dress en Bretonne? Why won't he allow her to be photographed? Who has ever heard what became of Madame Ingersoll? And aren't those two the image of each other?"

"Peridot," said Tollemache, "it would be a sad finish to a glorious day if I were to knock you down."

"It would, Monsieur."

"But that is just what I'll do, as sure as Fate, if you utter another word concerning Mademoiselle Yvonne or her father."

"Mad!" declared the other. "All you Americans are mad! A man never knows how to take you."

"Would you stand by and hear anyone running down Madeleine Demoret or her people?"

"Monsieur, I'd chew his ear!"

"Exactly. I'll spread your nose flat if you utter any more stupidities with regard to Mademoiselle Yvonne."

The Breton whistled softly, and staggered on up the hill. Each few yards thereafter he halted, and whistled, evidently expressing unbounded and inarticulate surprise. All this was intensely annoying to the young American; but it had to be endured. Even more trying was the leave-taking at the door of the Larraidou cottage. The Breton caught Tollemache's hand, and was moved to tears.

"Monsieur," he gurgled, "you have my regrets—a thousand regrets! I understand perfectly. A Frenchman comprehends these things quicker than any other man in the world, even when he has filled the lamp. Gars! If I chew ears and you flatten noses, between us we'll spoil the beauty of any rascal who dares open his mouth against either Mademoiselle Yvonne or Madeleine."

With difficulty Tollemache got rid of him, and strode back down the hill. He had blundered into that foolish comparison of the two girls without giving a thought to its possible significance. The one consolation was that Peridot would be tongue-tied with shame next day, and would probably remember only that he had made a fool of himself.

Passing the Hotel Julia, he ran into Yvonne hurrying down the steps of the annex. Then, of course, he flung care to the winds.

"Well met!" he cried. "Socrates told me you were not coming home till much later."

"But where have you been?" she asked. "I imagined you were at Madame Pitou's ages ago."

"As though you couldn't tell by my swollen appearance that I had supped on white wheat and fatted fowl," he rejoined. "Of course I was there. I've been escorting Peridot home. He took an extra appetizer on an empty stomach, and it upset him. How are the patients?"

"Dr. Garnier has set the broken arm and bandaged the sprain. He gave Mrs. Carmac a stiff dose of bromide, and she is asleep. She will recover if her nervous system withstands the shock."

"It was an extraordinary misfortune that the owner of the yacht should be the one to have his head battered in. His wife realizes now that he is dead, I suppose?"

"Yes, she knows."

They crossed the square together. To reach the Rue Mathias they had to go round by the bridge and return by the right bank of the Aven. The hour was not late, and many of the inhabitants were astir; but none gave heed to the unusual spectacle of a Breton girl and a young man walking in company, because both were recognized instantly, and in such matters the American and English residents were a law unto themselves. Had they been bred and born in the place, such a thing simply could not have happened.

Somehow Tollemache felt a restraint that night that was both novel and unpleasing. A barrier of some sort had been erected between Yvonne and himself. He cudgeled his wits to find words that would break down the obstacle, whatsoever it might be.

"We've had a lively evening at Madame's thus far," he said. "Riec and Nevez shared the honors in the gavotte; but everybody agreed that Pont Aven would have scored if you had been there."

"I couldn't have danced tonight, Lorry, on any account."

"I don't see why. Your father took a very sensible view. 'Why shouldn't twenty hop because one has hooked it?' he said."

"Did he really say that?"

"Well, something to that effect."

"Poor old dad! He has had to sacrifice himself all his life."

"Don't you think you're making too much of the death of one man? Suppose we hadn't taken Peridot with us? We couldn't possibly have approached the reef, and twelve people would have gone under."

"Ten were strangers, and one cannot grieve for all the people who die around us. But father knew Mr. and Mrs. Carmac years ago. Didn't he tell you that?"

"Yes."

"Then you may be sure he is greatly upset. Now, Lorry, if there is any talk of dancing when I appear, help my excuses by saying that I ought to rest. In one sense I'm not really tired; in another I could fling myself down in a dark corner and weep my eyes out."

"Your eyes are too pretty to spoil in that way," said Tollemache. "I'll give Mère Pitou the tip, and she'll fix things, I have no doubt."

But Yvonne was not pressed to dance. She was so pale, the eyes that Tollemache deemed too attractive that they should be marred by weeping were so dilated and luminous with unshed tears, that these big-hearted Bretons sympathized with her, and she was soon permitted to escape to her own room.

Father and daughter exchanged few words. She supplied a brief account of the doctor's view of the injured, and he only said:

"Thus far things are progressing well. Tomorrow morning I'm going to Forbes's place, at Concarneau, for a few days. Tollemache and you can help Mr. Raymond in his negotiations with the authorities. Mr. Carmac was an American, by birth, if not by domicile; so it is probable that his relatives will wish the body to be embalmed and taken to the United States. I would advise Mr. Raymond to consult a notary, because French procedure differs essentially from American methods. I've told Lorry about our altered plans. Perhaps we three can take a combined trip to Paris after Christmas. Goodnight, Sweetheart. Sleep well, and don't meet tomorrow's cares halfway."

Tollemache heard all that passed. Why, he knew not, but he found himself regretting that they were not leaving Pont Aven by the first train in accord with Ingersoll's original intent. He was more than ever conscious of that invisible wall which was now casting its shadow on their cheery intimacy. Yvonne would never again be a demure Breton maid or straight-legged, long-haired American schoolgirl. She had become a woman in an hour. Life had flung wide its portals, and the prospect thus unfolded had saddened her inexpressibly.

What sinister influence had brought about this change? Could there be any actual foundation for Peridot's vaporings? As he walked back to the hotel through darkened streets he recalled certain vague rumors that had reached his ears in early days. Ingersoll had always posed as a widower; but someone had said that his married life was rather mysterious, since there was no record of his wife's death or place of interment. It would indeed be passing strange if the wreck of the Stella had brought to Pont Aven the woman who was at once Yvonne's mother and the wife of a complete stranger.

Tollemache buttoned the deep collar of an overcoat round his ears as he crossed the river, because the wind was still bitingly cold. He caught a glimpse of Mère Pitou's cottage on the opposite bank of the Aven. There was a light in Yvonne's bedroom. Frankly in love, he threw her a kiss with his fingers.

The action did him, in his own phrase, "a heap of good." After all, such displays of emotion come naturally in France.

"I don't give a red cent who her mother was, or is, or what she has been, or turns out to be," he communed. "It's Yvonne I want. If Yvonne marries me some day, I'll be the happiest man who ever lived, and the most miserable if she doesn't. So there you are, Lorry, my boy! You must make the best of it, whichever way the flag falls."

Memories of peaceful and contented years flitted through Ingersoll's mind while the steam tram lumbered next morning through tiny fields and across rambling lanes to the quay of Concarneau. Other memories, vivid and piercing, came of the period of love and dreams in Paris. Lithe and graceful and divinely beautiful as her daughter was now, Stella Fordyce had been then. An artist to her fingertips, she came to the studio where Ingersoll was working, turning readily to the palette after some slight defect in the vocal cords had put difficulties in the way of an operatic career.

It seemed to be a genuine instance of love at first sight, and they were married within three months of what was practically their first meeting; though Ingersoll had seen her as a girl of fourteen several years earlier. This step was not so foolish as it might have been in the case of two young people without means. Ingersoll had an income of three thousand dollars a year, and complete devotion to art in his student days had enabled him to save a small capital, which he spent on an establishment, and particularly on adorning an exceptionally handsome and attractive wife.

It had been far better were they poverty-stricken. Mutual privations and combined effort to improve their lot would have bound them by insoluble ties. As it was the taste for pleasure and excitement crept into Stella Ingersoll's blood. The first tiff between the two was the outcome of some mild protest on Ingersoll's part when his wife wished to increase rather than diminish her personal expenditure after Yvonne's birth. There were tears, and of course the man yielded: only to raise the point again more determinedly when an absurdly expensive dress was ordered for a ball at the opera.

Thenceforth the road to the precipice became ever smoother and steeper; though Ingersoll did not begin to suspect the crash that lay ahead until his wife left him and fled to her relatives in America. Her callous abandonment of the baby girl not yet a year old crushed to the dust the man who loved her. She told him plainly why she had gone. She was "sick to death" of petty economies. Indeed, her letter of farewell was brutally frank.

"I think I have qualities that equip me for a society that you and I together could never enter," she wrote. "Why, then, should I deny myself while I am young, so that I may console vain regrets with copybook maxims when I am old? I see clearly that I would only embitter your life and spoil your career. Be wise, and take time to reflect, and you will come to believe that I am really serving you well by seeking my own liberty. Meanwhile I shall do nothing to bring discredit on your name. I promise that, on my honor!"

Her honor! All his life John Ingersoll had hated cant, either in dogma or phrase, and this ill-judged appeal stung him to the quick. He threw the letter into the fire, left Paris next day, and his wife's strenuous efforts to discover his whereabouts during the subsequent year failed completely.

Then he heard by chance that she had divorced him, and married Walter H. Carmac in her maiden name, and the tragic romance of his life closed with a sigh of relief, because, as he fancied, the curtain had fallen on its last act. He little dreamed that an epilogue would be staged nearly nineteen years later.

He was in such a state of mental distress that at Concarneau he sat a whole hour in a café opposite the station, meaning to return to Pont Aven by the next train. But the man's natural clarity of reasoning came to his aid. He forced himself to think dispassionately. Two vital principles served as rallying points in that time of silent battle,—Yvonne must not be reft with crude violence from the grief-stricken and physically broken woman who claimed a daughter's sympathy, and he himself must avoid meeting this wife risen from the tomb. He had acted right, after all, in seeking refuge with his friend.

Yvonne that same morning found her mother sitting up in bed, sipping a cup of chocolate. The nurse, a woman from the village, hailed the girl's presence gleefully.

"Will you be remaining a few minutes, Mademoiselle she inquired, seeing that invalid and visitor were on terms of intimacy.

"Yes, as long as you like, or will permit, Madame Bertrand," said Yvonne.

"That is well, then. I can go to my house for a little half-hour. There only two instructions. Madame must remain quiet. If she shows any signs of faintness, send at once for Dr. Garnier."

"I shall be strict and watchful," smiled the girl, and the two were left alone.

Her mother's first question threatened to disobey at least one of the doctor's instructions. "Does your father know you have come here?" she asked, and her voice trembled with foreboding.

"Yes, Dear. Now if you excite yourself in that way, I shall be expelled by the doctor," for the graceful head collapsed to the pillow in sheer gratitude, and the chocolate was nearly spilled.

"But you must tell me, Yvonne! Will he permit us to meet?"

"Do you think my father would forbid it? How you must have misunderstood his real nature! He has even gone away from Pont Aven for a few days, so that his presence in the village may not be irksome to you. Shall we try and pretend to forget what has passed, Dear? It is useless to grieve now over the mistakes of other years. And you will see, I am sure, that no one in Pont Aven should be able even to guess at our true relationship. I ask that for my father's sake. I love him dearly, and would not have him suffer."

With a splendid effort the older woman raised herself in the bed and summoned a wan smile. "Indeed, indeed," she cried, "I will do nothing more to injure him! Is that a hand mirror on the dressing table? Please give it me."

Yvonne hesitated, and her mother smiled again.

"I shall not grieve because of white and drawn cheeks," she said.

When she held, the mirror in a thin hand, and compared its reflection with Yvonne herself with critical eyes, the girl grasped her true intent. Her abundant hair, only a shade darker than Yvonne's own brown tresses, framed the well poised head and slender neck. Distress and lack of solid food had lent a pallor to cheeks and forehead which had the curious effect of rendering the clear-cut features strikingly youthful. Mouth and chin had a certain quality of hardness and obstinacy not discernible in the girl's face. Otherwise they resembled sisters rather than mother and daughter.

"Yvonne," she said wistfully, "if we say we are strangers, no one will believe. I shall invent a twin sister. You are my niece. I quarreled with my sister because she married an impoverished painter. Thin ice; but it must carry us. Your father has done the wisest possible thing in leaving Pont Aven today. He refuses to forgive my shabby treatment of a sister; but Christian charity impels him not to forbid you from visiting me. Don't volunteer this information. Let it be dragged from you unwillingly. It is a cruel thing that my first advice to you should be a lesson in duplicity; but I have earned that sort of scourge, and must endure. Now you understand. We are aunt and niece. Don't be surprised if I act a little when the nurse returns. By the way, write to your father and tell him what I have said. I'm sure he will approve, and the fact that I am eager to make this small atonement for the wrong I did him will show that I still retain some sense of fair dealing."

"Yes, Dear, I'll write today. I don't think it is very wicked to adopt a pretense that enables me to visit you without—without setting idle tongues wagging."

"Without causing a village scandal, you might well have said," came the bitter retort. "Very well, Yvonne, I will not say such things," for the girl winced at the unerring judgment that supplied the words that had nearly escaped her. "Now let us talk of other matters. Tell me something of yourself. Where and how do you live? Why are you wearing that costume? Do you dress like that habitually? And how wonderfully it becomes you! Talk, Dear, and I'll listen, and if I fall asleep when you are talking don't imagine that I am heedless and inattentive; for I have been brought nearer happiness in this hour than I would have believed possible yesterday. Do you realize that the wreck was directly due to my folly? The captain wished to put into the Aven estuary when the storm became very bad; but I refused to permit it. Wallie—that is Mr. Carmac—always yielded to my whims, and he imagined I preferred Lorient to Pont Aven. I didn't. I knew that your father lived here. His art proved more enduring than a woman's faith. It has made him famous; though I had the cruelty, the impertinence, to tell him once that he would never emerge from the ruck. I never heard of you. For some reason I thought you had died in infancy. Yvonne, Heaven forgive me, I may even have wished it! But you see now why I wanted to avoid Pont Aven. As though any of God's creatures can resist when He points the way!"

So it was the mother who did most of the talking, and the daughter who listened, with never a word of reproach, and not even a hint that had a wilful and conscience-tortured woman not imposed her imperious will on the Stella's course the yacht would have ridden the gale in safety in a roadstead five miles removed from the village of Pont Aven itself!

When Madame Bertrand bustled in her patient was asleep, and Yvonne's cheeks were tear-stained.

"Poor lady!" murmured the Breton woman. "She's nothing but a bundle of nerves. All night long, after the effect of the bromide had passed, she kept crying out for her daughter—meaning you, Mademoiselle. What a notion! Yet you are so alike!"

"With good reason, Madame," said the girl. "She is my mother's sister. There was a family quarrel years ago. Please keep this to yourself; though Madame Carmac will probably tell you of it later."

Yvonne was glad, when her father's letter arrived, to find that he agreed with the little deception, which hurt none, and explained away the seemingly inexplicable.

On the second day after the wreck Mrs. Carmac, outwardly at least, was restored to good health, and assumed direction of her husband's affairs.

Sending for Captain Popple, she asked if any effort had been made to salve the large sum of money and store of jewelry on board the yacht. The red-faced mariner had evidently been giving thought to the same problem.

"No, Ma'am," he said. "When the vessel struck those on deck had no mind to go below, and those below were hard put to it to get on deck. We all lost everything except what we stood up in. It has been blowin' great guns ever since, and a French gentleman who knows every inch of the coast tells me that the reef may be ungetatable for a fortnight, or even a month, unless there's a change in the weather."

"When you say you lost everything do you mean that you and some members of the crew lost money as well as clothing?"

"No, Ma'am. If any swab has the howdacity to pretend that a sovereign or two has slipped out of his pockets, I won't believe 'im; but it'll be hard to prove the contrary."

"Are you in any special hurry to return home? Have you another yacht in view?"

Some men might have hesitated, but Popple was bluntly honest, both in nature and speech. "Bless your heart, Ma'am!" he said huskily, "I'll get no more yachts unless I'm a luckier man after turnin' fifty than ever I was afore. The Stella was my last seagoin' job, an' no mistake."

"Then you will not suffer professionally by remaining here?"

"I'll stop as long as you like, Ma'am."

"Very well. I have telegraphed to my London bankers for a supply of money, which should reach me tomorrow. I want you to arrange for salvage operations. Employ a diver, and hire such other assistance as may be necessary. It is important that a jewelcase in one of my trunks should be recovered, if possible, also five thousand pounds in French and English bank-notes which is in a leather wallet locked in a steamer trunk beneath my husband's bed. That trunk also contains a number of important papers. I shall be glad if it is brought to me unopened, no matter what the expense. Meanwhile make out a list of all that is reasonably owing to the men, and tell them I shall arrange at once for their return to Southampton."

"I've done that already, Ma'am. Mr. Raymond tole me to get busy."

"Ah! That was thoughtful of him. In future, however, take orders from no one but me."

Captain Popple was evidently about to offer a comment, but checked himself in time. "Right you are, Ma'am," he said.

Mrs. Carmac smiled quietly. This outspoken sailor's face was easy to read. Yvonne was present, and he hardly knew what to say.

"You had something else on the tip of your tongue, Captain," she prompted. "Out with it! I have no secrets from this young lady."

"I don't like contradict'ry sailin' orders, Ma'am, an' that's a fact," admitted the skipper. "Mr. Raymond axed me not to do a thing, no matter who gev the word, without consultin' him."

"His arm is broken, I believe?"

"Yes, Ma'am; but he's able to get about today."

"That simplifies matters. Kindly send him here."

The sailor raised his hand in a clumsy salute, and went out.

"I am not an admirer of Mr. Raymond," said Mrs. Carmac to Yvonne. "He was a useful sort of person to my husband; but he has a Uriah Heep manner which I dislike intensely. Now I shall get rid of him."

For an instant the Breton shrewdness of judgment came uppermost in the girl. "Don't make an unnecessary enemy," she ventured to suggest.

"I simply purpose dismissing him on very generous terms."

"But—have you—forgotten—perhaps you never knew—how wildly you spoke that night in the cabin of the Hirondelle? Mr. Raymond was there too. He may have overheard a good deal."

Mrs. Carmac was momentarily staggered. "Do you think so?" she cried rather breathlessly.

"There was every opportunity. I saw the man, and he retained his senses, though in great pain."

"Thanks for the warning, Dear. I'll handle him gently."

"Shall I go?"

"I prefer that you should remain."

"But it might be better if you were to see him alone. He has not met me since we came ashore."

"Well—you may be right. I'll take your advice. Don't leave me too long alone. I mope when you are away."

Yvonne slipped out. She passed Raymond on the stairs; but he gave her no heed, regarding her as belonging to the establishment.

The secretary was a small, slightly built man, and, contrary to the rule that renders undersized mortals rather aggressive in manner, carried himself with a shrinking air, as though he wished to avoid observation. He had an intelligent face; though its general expression was somewhat marred by a heavy chin and eyes set too closely together. He looked pale and ill; which was only natural, because his broken arm, the right one, had not been attended to by a doctor until nearly three hours after the accident. He was about thirty-five, but looked much older that morning, and Yvonne wondered if he had any forewarning of trouble, so compressed were his thin lips and so frowning his brows.

He found his late employer's wife standing at the window, gazing down into the little triangular Place, as Pont Aven calls its public square. Yvonne was passing in front of the four sycamores. She had, in fact, secured a mourning order for her friend, Le Sellin the tailor, and was going to his shop on some errand connected therewith. Her mother noted the girl's free and graceful walk, and approved the proud carriage of her head, on which the white coif sat like a coronet. She sighed, and did not turn until Yvonne had vanished. Then she faced the waiting secretary.

"Ah, that you?" she said carelessly. "Pardon me if I seemed rude, Mr. Raymond. My thoughts were wandering. My niece has just left me, and, as I have not seen her for many years until she and her father saved our lives the other evening, I was minded to watch her crossing the square."

"Your niece, did you say, Mrs. Carmac?"

Raymond's voice was pitched in the right key of hesitancy and interested surprise; but this worldly wise woman was far too skilled a student of human nature to miss the underlying note of skepticism.

"Usually I speak clearly," she said, with a touch of hauteur.

"Yes, of course. I caught the word quite accurately. But may I remind you that you addressed her as your daughter in the cabin of the Hirondelle?"

"Does it matter to you, Mr. Raymond, how I addressed her?"

"No, no. I was only anxious to correct my own false impression."

Mrs. Carmac suddenly bethought herself. "My wits are still wool gathering," she cried. "Won't you sit down? I have a good many things to discuss with you. Is your arm very painful? Happily I have never suffered from a broken limb; but it sounds quite dreadful."

Raymond sank into a comfortable chair, steadying himself with his left hand. "It's not so bad now," he said. "By comparison with the torture of Thursday afternoon it is more than bearable. The chief misfortune lies in the fact that my right arm is out of action. I had no idea how little use I made of my left hand until I tried to write with it."

"The doctor seems to be a very clever man; but if you think it advisable to have your injury seen to by an expert——"

"Oh, it's only a simple fracture. I have every reason to believe that it is properly set. Indeed, all it needs now is efficient dressing—and time."

"How did you come to break it?"

"I was flung down the companionway when the yacht turned on her beam ends."

"But the last thing I remember, and very vividly too, is that you and I were holding to a rail and looking out through the forward window of the deck saloon. We felt a curious trembling of the hull, and the vessel swung round from the wind. There was a strange lull, and Captain Popple shouted something. I asked you what it was, and you said that the shaft had broken, and we should be dashed against the rocks in ten minutes or less. Then, I suppose, I fainted."

"I had not seen the reef. Even Captain Popple thought we should clear it. As a matter of fact, we struck within a minute."

"And you were thrown over then? I must have fallen earlier."

"Yes. My recollection is hazy as to what actually occurred."

"The marvel is that either of us is living," she said lightly. "I gather from Captain Popple that you have taken charge of affairs since we were brought ashore. Will you kindly tell me what you have done?"

"In the first instance I telegraphed to Mr. Carmac's nephew Mr. Rupert Fosdyke, his lawyer Mr. Bennett, his office, and his bankers. The text of each message was practically identical. It ran, 'Yacht wrecked and total loss off Finistère. Mr. Carmac unfortunately killed, but all others rescued. Mrs. Carmac seriously ill, but may recover.' I'm sorry I took an exaggerated view of your state; but the circumstances seemed to warrant it. Then I sent to Paris for an embalmer. Did I do right?"

At that instant her daughter's parting words rang in her ears. "Don't make an unnecessary enemy." Good advice! She must tread warily, or her sky might fall and crush her.

"Yes. As I shall receive Mr. Fosdyke and Mr. Bennett when they arrive, I think I shall rest now," she said faintly. "I am greatly beholden to you, Mr. Raymond. You are so intimately acquainted with my husband's affairs that I should be lost without your help."

She had meant to dismiss him forthwith, with a year's salary, and Raymond himself was prepared for some such action on her part; otherwise he would never have hinted at his possession of a secret so fraught with possibilities as the existence of a grown-up daughter, a daughter too whose father was living, and actually resident in Pont Aven. He was taken aback now, and bowed as courteously as his bandaged arm would permit.

"I shall be only too happy and proud to give you my best services, Mrs. Carmac," he said.

CHAPTER VII
MISCHIEF

Raymond felt that he had taken the step that counts, and resolved to make certain inquiries without delay. Already a cautious experiment with Tollemache had failed. Lorry had said that he knew nothing of Ingersoll's history before the last five years, and had shown some surprise at the question.

Captain Popple, however, had mentioned Peridot; so Raymond climbed the steep Toulifot, and within five minutes of his departure from Mrs. Carmac's quarters was at the Breton's house.

As it happened, Peridot was at home, it being the hour of déjeuner, and a grateful incense of grilled haddock and fried potatoes greeted the visitor. He was recognized instantly of course, and invited to enter, and Peridot broke into a voluble expression of his pleasure at finding Monsieur so far recovered that he was able to take a little promenade. Raymond gathered the drift of this speech, as he understood French better than he spoke it.

"I have taken the liberty to call and thank you personally for the aid you rendered on Thursday evening," he said laboriously. "You and the others did a wonderful thing. The captain of the yacht has explained it to me. I was injured when the vessel struck, and knew little of what took place afterward."

"It was lucky for you, Monsieur, that we happened to be out that day. If we hadn't been passing at that very moment, nothing could have saved you. The people at Brigneau tell me that the yacht broke in two and fell into deep water before we were well clear of the reef."

Neither Peridot nor Raymond had any inkling of Mrs. Carmac's projected salvage work by a diver, or the Breton would have added his conviction that the fierce tides racing along the Finistère coast would render the success of any such undertaking doubtful in the extreme.

"The gentleman who owns the Hirondelle is an artist, I believe?" went on Raymond.

"One of the most renowned," said Peridot.

"His daughter was with him?"

"The prettiest girl in Pont Aven, Monsieur."

"Is there a Madame Ingersoll?"

Now, Peridot was sober as a judge that day, and his Breton wits worked quickly. He did not fail to recall his friend's distress on hearing the name of the Stella's owner, nor his avowed desire to escape recognition. True, Monsieur Ingersoll had not gone to Paris; but Barbe had told him of the journey to Concarneau, and everyone in Pont Aven knew of Yvonne's close attendance on Madame Carmac. Moreover, did not Monsieur Ingersoll show terrible anger because of an unhappy reference to the likeness between his daughter and the American lady, and had not Peridot himself promised to lie like a gendarme if any questions were asked? Now was his chance to serve a generous patron. This little fox of a man, with beady eyes and cruel mouth, had come there to pry! Very well—he should go away stuffed with information!

All this required but a fraction of a second to flash across a lively French brain.

"Monsieur Ingersoll is a widower, Monsieur." Peridot was merely stepping back in order to jump farther.

"Ah, yes. I have heard that. His wife died before he came to Pont Aven, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, Monsieur. Poor lady! I knew her well! Her last words to me were, 'Peridot, you were born with a caul, and will never be drowned; so promise me that when my husband and little Yvonne go to sea you will always be with them.' You see, she went off in a consumption, and——"

"Pardon!" interrupted Raymond, sorely chagrined by the immense significance of the fisherman's words, supposing he had followed their meaning correctly. "Will you be good enough to speak more slowly? What were you born with?"

"Une coiffe d'enfant, Monsieur."

Raymond knew neither the word nor the curious superstition attached to it; but he caught the one thing of vital interest. "So Madame Ingersoll lived in Pont Aven?" he went on, and his rancorous tone betrayed venom and disappointment.

Peridot, convinced now that he was doing the artist a good turn, gave full play to his imagination.

"Certainly, Monsieur," he said. "Never was there a more devoted couple. Quite a romance, their courting! She was a fine lady, as anyone can see with half an eye by squinting at her daughter, and he a poor artist. Her people used to come in the summer to a château nearby, and one day when they met he gave her a beautiful pink rose. Her mother was angry, and made her throw the flower away; but an artist was not to be bested by any nose-tilted mama. He knew that they went to the church at Nizon; so he made a paper rose, and borrowed a ladder, and stuck the token between the topmost stones of an arch in the church right above their heads, so that pretty Mademoiselle Adrienne must see it when she lifted her eyes to Heaven. There was a lot of talk about that rose, and no one except the girl guessed who put it there. If you care to walk out to Nizon, Monsieur, you'll see the faded leaves stuck in the arch to this day. Of course I can't vouch for the tale; but the fact that it is told of those two shows what devoted lovers they were."

"Is Madame Ingersoll buried at Nizon?"

That was Raymond's last despairing effort. The fisherman's story tallied accurately with Mrs. Carmac's version of a sister's marriage and a family quarrel.

Peridot thought he had gone far enough: his next effort showed less exuberance. "No, Monsieur," he said, with a solemn wagging of his head, "when she died she was taken back to her own people, somewhere near Paris."

"Was she a Frenchwoman, then?"

"French and American, I believe, Monsieur. Spoke both languages like a native."

Utterly disheartened, Raymond made off. The fortune he had seen within his grasp had melted into thin air.

Peridot gazed after him, and pursed his lips. "Now I wonder what mischief that fellow is up to?" he mused.

"Jean," said his mother, "come and eat; but first ask the good Lord to save you from choking."

"Why, Mother?"

"Because of the lies you told that gentleman. And that yarn about the rose at Nizon!"

"What business is it of his who Mademoiselle Yvonne's mother was, or where she lived, or when she died?"

"But everyone in Pont Aven knows that Monsieur Ingersoll came here from Paris with the little one. And we women have often said to one another it was strange that never a word was uttered about his wife, whether she was alive or dead."

"Then it is high time someone spoke of the lady, and I gave her an excellent character today. All I hope is that it suffices."

It did nearly suffice. But for the tongue of a garrulous woman, Harvey Raymond would have given his close attention to matters that he might rightly deem of more pressing and immediate interest; the salving of the Stella's belongings, for instance, which came to his knowledge almost accidentally.

The more he reflected on Peridot's scraps of history the more he was convinced that he had found a mare's nest, despite Mrs. Carmac's extraordinary outburst in the Hirondelle's cabin. Exhausted and pain-tortured though he had been, he could still distinguish between the raving of dementia and the ungoverned cry of a soul just snatched from death and startled beyond measure by the apparition of a long-forgotten daughter.

Nevertheless he must have been mistaken. Mrs. Carmac had given way to a delusion. He knew that the absence of children had provided the only sorrow in the lives of a most devoted couple, and the thought had evidently taken a subconscious form in the mind of a woman whose faculties were bemused by cold and fear. Reviewing matters in the new light vouchsafed by the garrulous Breton, he saw that nearly every circumstance bore out the theory that Mrs. Carmac and the late Mrs. Ingersoll were sisters. Ingersoll's thoughtfulness in sending Tollemache with a message concerning the peculiarities of French law (the legal procedure with regard to the dead man had been intrusted to a local notary), the fact that the niece visited her aunt, and now the crushing discovery that the girl's mother was actually remembered in the village, seemed to put completely out of court any wild theory of an invalid marriage following an American divorce.

Of course if such a thing could be proved, if Carmac's English will could be upset in favor of Rupert Fosdyke, above all if Harvey Raymond alone knew the whole truth, and could wring stiff terms from Fosdyke before the latter so much as guessed at the grounds for a successful claim, then indeed a new era would open up before the eyes of one who hungered for wealth without having a spark of the genius that might create it honestly.

He was of that large and increasing class which is in many respects the worst product of modern social conditions. He had little to do, was well paid, and traveled far and wide, because Mr. and Mrs. Carmac were restless beings, and seldom lived more than three months of each year on the delightful estate they owned in Surrey. Nevertheless a canker of discontent had eaten into his moral fiber. He was a disappointed man, unscrupulous, greedy, a potential blackmailer.

Mrs. Carmac disliked him, he knew; yet she was retaining his services. That was a puzzle. He must be wary and alert. If not a prior marriage, there was something. He must probe and delve into the past. Somehow, somewhere, he would unearth a guarded secret.

Luck would have it that he met Captain Popple, standing on the "terrace," with his hands in his pockets and a pipe clenched between his teeth, gazing up at the sky.

"Good day, Sir," said the sailor. "Glad to see yer movin' around. Now if I could on'y figure out the lingo they talk in Pont Aven, I'd swap idees on the weather with any old charac-ter I saw at anchor."

"What is it you want to know, Captain?" said Raymond, hailing the other's presence as a relief from somber thoughts.

"Well, to my thinkin', the weather's goin' to clear. The wind's a trifle steadier, and gone round a point to east'ard. At this time o' year that means a risin' glass an' frost."

"A frost would be more cheerful, certainly, than a gale howling about the chimneys."

"The sea will fall too. A couple of tides should iron it out, an' I'll have a peep at that reef."

"But why?"

"Mrs. Carmac's orders, Sir. I'm to spare no expense in searchin' for some boxes an' other oddments."

Raymond turned abruptly, and walked to a garden seat beneath the window of the hotel dining room. He moved with a curious swing of the legs, as though his knees were unequal to the task of supporting his body.

Popple followed hastily. "W'at's up?" he cried. "Are ye feelin' bad? Been doin' too much, I s'pose."

"No. It's nothing. Could you—call a maid? If I have a sip of brandy—and rest awhile—the weakness will pass."

The skipper bustled into the hotel and found a waitress. "Cognac—queek!" he said.

The girl smiled. She understood fully.

"Oui, Monsieur," she said.

But Popple deemed the matter urgent. "Gentleman eel—vare seek," he insisted.

"Yes, Sir," said the maid, to her hearer's profound surprise. "I've got you. I'll be along before you can say 'knife.'"

"Sink me!" roared Popple. "Here have I been spittin' French all this time, an' you can sling the right stuff at me in that style!"

He received another broad smile, and the linguist vanished. Thenceforth the two held long conversations when they met; but some days elapsed before Popple realized that the chat was rather one-sided. The girl had been taught a few slang phrases by an American artist, which, together with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the average tourist's requirements, completed her vocabulary.

"Lord love a duck, but it's a treat to hear honest English once more!" he said, returning to Raymond, whose pinched face was a ghastly yellow. "How are ye now, Sir? Gettin' over it?"

"Yes. I'm not what you would regard as robust, Captain, and Thursday afternoon's experiences placed a severe strain on my powers of resistance. Did you say you expected a frost? The weather is quite mild today, don't you think? Sit down, and join me in a drink when the brandy comes."

"Don't mind if I do, Sir. But are you sure you oughtn't to be in bed?"

"Quite sure. I walked a little too far, and I find these hills trying—that is all. Ah, here comes Marie with the medicine."

"Is that your name—Marie?" inquired Popple, eying the girl admiringly.

"Yes, Sir," and a pair of fine Breton brown eyes sparkled.

"An' very nice too!" said he. "Mighty fetchin' rig the gals have in this part," he went on, pouring out some brandy for Raymond, which the latter drank neat. "They look like so many dandy housemaids got up for a fancy ball. Now, if my old woman could see me makin' googoo eyes at a tasty bit like Marie—well, there'd be a double entry in the family log."

"What's this nonsense that Mrs. Carmac has got into her head about salving certain articles from the Stella?" said Raymond, whose voice had regained its normal harshness of tone. Small men usually have strong voices. Your giant of a fellow will pipe in a childish treble.

"Why do you say it's nonsense, Sir?" demanded Popple sharply.

"What else can it be? Salvage, in relation to a yacht pounded to pieces on an exposed reef two days ago! I don't think 'nonsense' too strong a term."

"It wouldn't be if every mortal thing had been bangin' on those rocks ever since. But the Stella was partin' amidships afore we were clear of her. She'd slip over into deep water within a few minutes, an' lie there quiet enough. Anyhow, them's my orders."

Raymond might be cantankerous because of his disablement; but Popple had suddenly remembered that Mrs. Carmac had resented the secretary's earlier interference. Raymond, however, helped to smooth over the difficulty.

"Of course I am only expressing an opinion," he said. "I admit it is not worth much. A little while ago I was speaking to Larraidou, the fisherman whom people here call Peridot, you know, and had I known then of your project I should have asked him what he thought of it."

"The sea is one big mystery, an' that's a fact," said Popple, refilling his pipe, and nodding his head to emphasize a bit of sententious philosophy born of experience. "It'll gobble up a ship, an' you'll never find a scrap of timber or a life belt to tell you what's become of her, an' in the next breath it'll show a thing as plain as though it was writ in a book. A friend of mine, skipper of a Hull trawler, missed a deckhand one day, and no one knew what had become of him. That night they shot the trawl in sixty fathom o' water, an' brought up the man's body. That's w'at the sea can do, Sir. Talk of women bein' fickle—they ain't in it with the most changeable thing on this earth."

Raymond poured out a second glass of brandy. "At any rate, you'll not recover a dead body from the Stella's wreckage," he said, with a ghastly grin.

"You never can tell," said Popple.

"But surely, Captain, you don't pretend that the finding of a drowned sailor in a trawl net was other than an accident?"

"That's as may be. S'pose some poor wastrel had been charged with knockin' a matey on the head an' chuckin' him overboard. The doctor's evidence would clear him. Then it 'ud ha been providential."

"I shall refuse to believe that you will retrieve any of the Stella's contents until I see them. Of course I know why Mrs. Carmac is so anxious that the effort should be made. There were thousands of pounds' worth of pearls and diamonds in her jewelcase. One pearl necklace alone cost ten thousand pounds many years ago, and would fetch far more today."

"Queer you should mention that, Sir," commented Popple.

"Why?" The question came with strange eagerness. The prospect of salvage was either fascinating or highly distasteful to Raymond.

"Because that's the one thing I shouldn't expect to come across."

"You are speaking in riddles, Man. What have you in your mind?"

Popple turned a mildly inquiring eye on this testy companion. He thought, "That drop o' spirit has gone the wrong way, my friend." But what he said was, "I was thinkin' of the sea's whims. It'll hide a six-decked liner an' give up a corpse. If Mrs. Carmac was keen set on pickin' up a pair o' scissors, I'd back them to turn up as ag'in' your ten-thousand-pound necklace. Mebbe that's a silly thing to say in this case. Her jew'ls are in a locked box, an' a strong one at that, because I twigged her baggage when it kem aboard, an' the lot was built for hard wear. But there you are! I'll take care she has a look at the stuff we find, an' that ends my job."

"You can count on me, Captain, for all the assistance I can render," said Raymond, and the subject dropped.

"By the way," he went on, adopting the most nonchalant tone he could command, "have you met Mrs. Carmac's niece since we came ashore?"

"Me, Sir? No. Didn't know there was any such young woman."

"You have not been told, then, that Mrs. Carmac found a long-lost niece in Miss Yvonne Ingersoll?"

Popple slapped a stout thigh, and his eyes rounded in surprise. "Sink me! but that explains it!" he cried.

"Explains what?"

"I wondered where I had seen the girl in bib an' tucker afore."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, these here caps an' streamers an' tickle-me aprons do make a heap of difference! Now what in the world will she think of me? I've passed her a dozen times without ever a 'Thank you, Miss,' or a touch of me hat. Dash my buttons! I thought my eyes were sharper'n that! Of course she was wrapped in a sou'wester an' oilskin the other day, an' so was Mrs. Carmac; so I piped the likeness then, an' even spoke of it to Mr. Ingersoll. But I must ha been rattled when I was in Mrs. Carmac's room a bit since. Of course I remember now. That was her, right enough."

"Would you mind telling me what you are rambling about, Captain Popple?"

Popple grinned. "There's a pair of us, Mr. Raymond," he cried. "You don't seem to know much about the lady, either. You met her on the stairs when you went to see Mrs. Carmac, because I happened to notice that she kem down as you went up."

"A girl in Breton costume?"

"That's it. She's lived here since she was a baby, an' I s'pose she took to the village ways."

Raymond was so astounded by a fact that, after all, was not of vital importance, that he put the next question literally to gain time for the readjustment of his ideas. "You have heard something of her history, then?"

"Oh, ay. She an' her father are well thought of in Pont Aven. A lady who's stayin' in there," and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the hotel, "tole me all about the pair of 'em. Mr. Ingersoll is by way of bein' a great hand at paintin'; but he settled down in this little spot nearly nineteen years ago, and has never left it. Miss Yvonne would be a baby then; but she's grown into a damn fine young woman since—an' she ain't the on'y one in the parish, if I'm any judge."

"Mr. Ingersoll lost his wife here. That probably accounts for his wish to remain."

Popple's face creased in a frown of perplexity. "That isn't w'at the lady said," he explained. "Her story was that Mrs. Ingersoll died in Paris, probably when the baby was born. Anyhow, no one in Pont Aven had ever seen her, as she axed particular. Not that it could ha been any business of hers, but a woman likes to ferret out every atom of gossip, an' there's bound to be a lot of talk about any girl as good lookin' as Miss Ingersoll."

Popple little guessed—he never knew—what a tornado he let loose by those words. "Dear me! Dear me! How very curious!" gasped Raymond.

And at that moment Yvonne herself came across the Place from Le Sellin's, having undergone a process of "fitting" to which her mother was unequal. The two were alike even in height and figure. If anything, Mrs. Carmac was rather more slender than her daughter, because the girl's muscles were well developed by long walks and plenty of exercise in an outrigger, whereas the older woman had been self-indulgent and frail all her life.

Both men stood up. She noticed their action, and protested smilingly.

"Please don't rise, Mr. Raymond," she said. "I hope you don't think I have neglected you, but I have inquired from Dr. Garnier several times as to your well-being, and I knew you were in good hands here, while my own time has been occupied in looking after Mrs. Carmac, who was really very ill until this morning. As for you, Captain Popple, I didn't need to glance twice at you to see that a small thing like a shipwreck hadn't disturbed you in the least."

"Miss," said Popple, "you'll believe me, I know, when I say I didn't reckernize you upstairs. Sink me! I couldn't imagine that any young lady could look so pretty in two different ways."

She laughed delightedly, for the first time since the doleful twin sisters, Sorrow and Suffering, had discovered her. "Now I understand why a sailor has a lass in every port," she said. "You cannot fail to be a success with the girls if you talk to them in that fashion."

Popple had never before been accused of being a ladykiller. He grinned, and his red face grew purple. "Me, Miss?" he cried. "Bless your little heart! I was on'y tellin' the solemn truth. You looked like a seafarin' angel when I saw you through the scud an' spray dashin' over that reef. An' now—well, if the folk hereabout want to advertise Pont Aven, they ought to put you on a poster."

"Captain, I must not have my head turned by such compliments. Wait till Tuesday, our market day, and you will meet dozens of girls who put me in the shade. Is your arm fairly comfortable, Mr. Raymond?"

The secretary, whose eyes had glowered on every unstudied poise and trick of expression that stamped Yvonne as Mrs. Carmac's daughter, even to a markedly clear enunciation, and an almost coquettish sidelong glance when specially amused, had been given time to collect his faculties by Popple's tribute of admiration.

"Yes, thank you, Miss Ingersoll," he said, striving to tune his harsh voice to a note of reverential courtesy. "If I possessed Captain Popple's gift of speech, I should try to vie with him in imagery. May I say that I have always considered Mrs. Carmac as one of the most strikingly handsome women I have ever seen, so I can well appreciate the fact that you are her niece?"

"Lorry," cried the smiling girl, "come out here and tell these flatterers how horrid I can be at times!"

Raymond turned so quickly that he wrenched his arm slightly, and was hard put to it to suppress a groan. Tollemache was standing at the open window directly behind the seat that Popple and himself had occupied. How long had he been there? What had he heard? Certainly the path of the evildoer was not being made smooth, and the scheming secretary had experienced various thrills in the course of one short hour.

"Mr. Raymond is a shrewd judge of womankind, I am sure," said Tollemache quietly, "and he would never accept my estimate of you, Yvonne. Will you be home for tea? And may I come? I have some news for you."

Yvonne simply announced that he would find her at the cottage about four o'clock. Then, with a hand-wave to her friend and a graceful bow to the others, she hurried to the annex, running into Peridot as she went.

"Ah, bon jour, Ma'mselle!" he cried, smiling broadly and flourishing his cap. "Did Monsieur Tollemache tell you what a fool I made of myself the other night?"

"No," she said. "Nothing Monsieur Tollemache could say would shake my high opinion of you. How is Madeleine? I haven't seen her since the supper party."

"Neither have I, Ma'mselle," and the merry Breton face suddenly became woebegone.

"What, then? Have you quarreled?"

"She too was vexed with me."

"I'll put that right, Peridot. Kenavo." [Breton for "Au revoir.">[

"Kenavo, Ma'mselle," and Peridot strolled toward the quay, but not without a sharp glance at the man whom he had gulled so thoroughly.

"Lord love a duck!" sighed Popple. "I wish my eddication hadn't been neglected when I was a nipper. I wasn't brought up. I was fetched up. Just listen to them two! Well, I'll bear in the direction of the telegraph office. I'm expectin' a wire from Brest about a diver. So long, Mr. Raymond!"

"Goodby, Captain. If you want me during the next two hours, I shall be in my room."

Popple lumbered away, and Raymond would have gone to the annex had he not been stayed by Tollemache.

"A word with you, Mr. Raymond. I want to explain that Mr. Ingersoll and his daughter are my closest friends."

The secretary wheeled round slowly. He had no fear of this stalwart young American, whom he classed with the well dressed, athletic, feather-brained "nuts" of British society.

"I think you are to be envied," he said smilingly.

Tollemache did not smile. His frank features were thought-laden and stern. Yvonne would have read his expression unerringly. Lorry was troubled but determined.

"I am not parading the friendship for any other reason than as a warning that I shall not tolerate any prying into their affairs," he said, evidently choosing the words with care.

Raymond affected vast astonishment. "If you overheard the conversation between Captain Popple and me, you must be aware that I knew little or nothing about Mr. Ingersoll and Mademoiselle Yvonne," he retorted.

"That wasn't your fault, I imagine."

"I don't understand what you are driving at. Suppose I have shown some interest in them, isn't it reasonable—people to whom I owe my life?"

"A most excellent sentiment, Mr. Raymond. Don't forget it, and wander into bypaths, where you will most certainly meet me. And I'm a big, hulking fellow, you know, who is likely to block the way."

"Again I say that I have done nothing to deserve the implied threat."

"And again I say that I'll lick the stuffing out of anyone who so much as tries to annoy my friends."

"I have no wish to feel otherwise than exceedingly grateful to them, and I cannot allow you or any other person to dictate to me in the matter. Your remarks are—incomprehensible."

Tollemache gave him no further reply than a steady stare, which discomfited Raymond far more than any words. With an angry sniff he abandoned the contest, and walked unsteadily across the irregular cobble-stones that paved the roadway.

CHAPTER VIII
THE TIGHTENING OF THE NET

In the ordinary course of events the mortal remains of Walter Carmac would have been inclosed in a leaden shell and transhipped to the United States for burial. But a woman's whim intervened. Mrs. Carmac suddenly decreed that the interment should take place at Nizon. Pont Aven possesses no cemetery of its own. Nizon, perched on the plateau of a neighboring hill, provides a final resting place for dwellers in the valley. Thither was borne in state a huge casket containing the body of the dead millionaire.

Such a funeral had not been seen at Pont Aven in many a year. The village turned out en masse. By that time everyone knew of the extraordinary coincidence that brought Yvonne to the rescue of a wrecked vessel that had her aunt on board. When the news spread that the woman was immensely rich local interest rose to boiling point.

Many and various, therefore, were the conjectures of the crowd as soon as it was seen that the widow, who insisted on attending the ceremony, was not accompanied by her niece. She was escorted to a carriage by her husband's nephew, a tall, slim, dark-featured young man of aristocratic appearance. In a second carriage were seated Bennett, the lawyer, head of the firm of Bennett, Son & Hoyle, an elderly man who had conveyancing and mortgage stamped on his shrewd yet kindly face; Captain Popple, hectic in a suit of black; and Raymond, looking smaller and more dejected than ever in his mourning attire. That was all, in so far as relatives and friends were concerned.

The third and last carriage contained a local notary, the mayor of Pont Aven, and Dr. Garnier.

Mrs. Carmac's unexpected decision that her husband should be buried in Brittany was made known only when it was impossible for others to come from a distance. With one exception, the steward whose ankle was sprained, the crew of the Stella had been sent to England; so the millionaire was followed to the grave by few who were acquainted with him in life. But the village saw to it that the cortège lost nothing in dignity or size. Gendarmes, custom house officials, and various town functionaries marched behind the carriages. Half a dozen sailors of the French marine yielded to the national love of a spectacle, and fell into line. Then came the townsfolk in serried ranks, the Breton garb of men and women adding a semibarbaric touch of color.

A Paris correspondent of a New York daily expressed the opinion to a colleague that the bereaved wife had acted right in burying her husband within sight of the sea that had claimed him as a victim.

"At first," he said, "I thought it a somewhat peculiar proceeding. Now I begin to understand. If I had any choice in the matter, I should certainly prefer to find my last home in this peaceful little spot rather than fill lot number so-and-so in a crowded cemetery."

"Tastes differ," said the other. "Personally I'd like to have my ashes bottled and put in a window overlooking Broadway. Who comes in for all the money?"

"The widow, I'm told."

"Doesn't young Fosdyke get a slice?"

"Don't know. No good trying to worm anything out of Bennett."

"Fosdyke looks like a southern Frenchman. He's English, I suppose?"

"Yes, by birth and residence. But his father was an American,—came over with a racing crowd in the '80's,—and married a pretty Creole."

"Oh, is that it?"

"Well, there's a drop of negro blood in the family; away back, perhaps, but unmistakable. Did you ever meet Carmac?"

"No."

"A tremendous fellow; but years ago he was as thin as Fosdyke."

"How did they make their money?"

"Cotton, and backing the North during the Civil War. That's why they left the States. The pure-blooded Southerners didn't like 'em, anyway, and the men who fought under Lee and Stonewall Jackson would have tarred and feathered the whole tribe afterward."

"What's this I hear about a niece discovered in Pont Aven by the lady?"

"Haven't you seen her?"

"No."

"Then take my advice, and quit by the next train. You're too impressionable. One glimpse of her, and your life's a wreck. She's the prettiest ever."

"Why isn't she here today?"

"Ask me another. But if I were Fosdyke, I'd be in no hurry to rush back to smoky London. By hook or by crook I'd keep Uncle's money in the family."

This well informed cynic had not gone an inch beyond the known facts concerning the Carmacs. At twenty-five the man now dead was endowed with that peculiar quality of looks which is often the heritage of men and women of mixed descent, when all other traces of a negroid strain are eliminated save the black and plentiful hair, the brilliant eyes, the strong white teeth, a supple frame, and a definite thickness of skin which makes for perfect complexion and coloring.