s. On fete
days, he wore in addition a scarlet neck-tie girdling his scrawny
throat. He had watched Yvonne for a long time, very much as the snake in
the fable saved the young dove until it was grown.

And so, Yvonne grew to dreaming while the cows strayed. Once the Pere
Bourron struck at her with a spade for her negligence, but missed.
Another night he beat her soundly for letting a cow get stalled in the
mud. The days on the marsh now became interminable, for he worked for
Gavelle, the carpenter, a good three _kilometres_ back of Pont du Sable
and the two could see each other only on fete days when he met her
secretly among the dunes or in the evenings near the farm. He would wait
for her then at the edge of the woods skirting the misty sea of pasture
that spread out below the farm like some vast and silent dry lake,
dotted here and there with groups of sleeping cattle.

She saw Marianne but seldom now, for the latter fished mostly at the
Three Wolves, sharing her catch with a crew of eight fishermen. Often
they would seine the edge of the coast, their boat dancing off beyond
the breakers while they netted the shallow water, swishing up the hard
beach--these gamblers of the sea. They worked with skill and precision,
each one having his share to do, while one--the quickest--was appointed
to carry their bundle of dry clothes rolled in a tarpaulin.

Marianne seemed of casual importance to her now. We seldom think of our
best friends in time of love. Yvonne cried for his kisses which at
first she did not wholly understand, but which she grew to hunger for,
just as when she was little she craved for all she wanted to eat for
once--and candy.

She began to think of herself, too--of Jean's scarlet cravat--of his new
shoes too tight for him, which he wore with the pride of a village dandy
on fete days and Sundays--and of her own patched and pitifully scanty
wardrobe.

"She has nothing, that little one," she had heard the gossips remark
openly before her, time and time again, when she was a child. Now that
she was budding into womanhood and was physically twice as strong as
Jean, now that she was conscious of _herself_, she began to know the
pangs of vanity.

It was about this time that she bought the ribbon, just as Marianne had
foretold, a red ribbon to match Jean's tie, and which she fashioned into
a bow and kept in a paper box, well hidden in the straw of her bed. The
patched skirt had long ago grown too short, and