he docks
in Havre; and this by-and-by might be worth a great deal. Their
fortunes were thus approximately equal, and certainly the young widow
attracted him greatly.

As he watched her walking in front of him that day he said to himself:

"I must really decide; I cannot do better, I am sure."

They went down a little ravine, sloping from the village to the cliff,
and the cliff, at the end of this comb, rose about eighty meters above
the sea. Framed between the green slopes to the right and left, a
great triangle of silvery blue water could be seen in the distance,
and a sail, scarcely visible, looked like an insect out there. The
sky, pale with light, was so merged into one with the water that it
was impossible to see where one ended and the other began; and the two
women, walking in front of the men, stood out against this bright
background, their shapes clearly defined in their closely-fitting
dresses.

Jean, with a sparkle in his eye, watched the smart ankle, the neat
leg, the supple waist, and the coquettish broad hat of Mme. Rosemilly
as they fled away before him. And this flight fired his ardor, urging
him on to the sudden determination which comes to hesitating and timid
natures. The warm air, fragrant with seacoast odors--gorse, clover
and thyme, mingling with the salt smell of the rocks at low
tide--excited him still more, mounting to his brain; and every moment
he felt a little more determined, at every step, at every glance he
cast at the alert figure; he made up his mind to delay no longer, to
tell her that he loved her and hoped to marry her. The prawn-fishing
would favor him by affording him an opportunity; and it would be a
pretty scene too, a pretty spot for love-making--their feet in a pool
of limpid water while they watched the long feelers of the shrimps
lurking under the wrack.

When they had reached the end of the comb and the edge of cliff, they
saw a little footpath slanting down the face of it; and below them,
about half-way between the sea and the foot of the precipice, an
amazing chaos of enormous boulders tumbled over and piled one above
the other on a sort of grassy and undulating plain which extended as
far as they could see to the southward, formed by an ancient landslip.
On this long shelf of brushwood and grass, disrupted, as it seemed, by
the shocks of a volcano, the fallen rocks seemed the wreck of a great
ruined city which had once looked out on the ocean, sheltered by the
long