summers, by poor Granny Moan, who used to give her Sylvestre to mind
during her days of hard work in Paimpol. Gaud felt the adoration of
a young mother for the child confided to her tender care. She was his
elder by about eighteen months. He was as dark as she was fair, as
obedient and caressing as she was hasty and capricious. She well
remembered that part of her life; neither wealth nor town life had
altered it; and like a far-off dream of wild freedom it came back to
her, or as the remembrance of an undefined and mysterious previous
existence, where the sandy shores seemed longer, and the cliffs higher
and nobler.

Towards the age of five or six, which seemed long ago to her, wealth had
befallen her father, who began to buy and sell the cargoes of ships. She
had been taken to Saint-Brieuc, and later to Paris. And from _la petite
Gaud_ she had become Mademoiselle Marguerite, tall and serious, with
earnest eyes. Always left to herself, in another kind of solitude than
that of the Breton coast, she still retained the obstinate nature of her
childhood.

Living in large towns, her dress had become more modified than herself.
Although she still wore the _coiffe_ that Breton women discard so
seldom, she had learned to dress herself in another way.

Every year she had returned to Brittany with her father--in the summer
only, like a fashionable, coming to bathe in the sea--and lived again in
the midst of old memories, delighted to hear herself called Gaud, rather
curious to see the Icelanders of whom so much was said, who were never
at home, and of whom, each year, some were missing; on all sides she
heard the name of Iceland, which appeared to her as a distant insatiable
abyss. And there, now, was the man she loved!

One fine day she had returned to live in the midst of these fishers,
through a whim of her father, who had wished to end his days there, and
live like a landsman in the market-place of Paimpol.

The good old dame, poor but tidy, left Gaud with cordial thanks as soon
as the letter had been read again and the envelope closed. She lived
rather far away, at the other end of Ploubazlanec, in a hamlet on the
coast, in the same cottage where she first had seen the light of day,
and where her sons and grandsons had been born. In the town, as she
passed along, she answered many friendly nods; she was one of the oldest
inhabitants of the country, the last of a worthy and highly esteemed
family.

With great care and