the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore. But, mon
Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come
grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks"--he smiled a grim
smile--"break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of
hell upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,"--his voice got
low with a kind of devilish joy,--"there is a finger--Jesu! you should
see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth,
waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then--and
then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the
sea, come down from the sky--all waiting, waiting for something! No, no,
you would not stay here."

Pierre looked again to that point in the shore towards which Gaspard's
eyes had been cast. The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern,
sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an
insolent harshness. Day perched garishly there. Yet now and then the
staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows--great fissures in
the rocks and lanes between. These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why,
he could not say. He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy
vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard. Why should
Gaspard remain here year after year? His occupation was nominally a
pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter. A
pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness.
In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle. He gave the
impression of bigness, though he was small in stature. Yet, as Pierre
studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about
him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look
unless. If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her,
some reflection of her face, passes to yours and stays there; and if a
child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a
kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.

Pierre knew that a man will cherish with a deep, eternal purpose a
memory of a woman or a child, when, no matter how compelling his cue
to remember where a man is concerned, he will yield it up in the end to
time. Certain speculations arranged themselves definitely in Pierre's
mind: there was a woman, maybe a child once; there was some sorrowful
mystery about them; there was a point in the shore that had held the