early in the afternoon to the house
she had near Kervanion. She had to pay some of the men who worked in her
granite quarry there, and she went in good time because her little house
contained a shop where the workmen could spend their wages without the
trouble of going to town. The house stood alone amongst rocks. A lane
of mud and stones ended at the door. The sea-winds coming ashore on
Stonecutter's point, fresh from the fierce turmoil of the waves, howled
violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders holding up steadily
short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous rush of the invisible.
In the sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling stood in a calm resonant
and disquieting, like the calm in the centre of a hurricane. On stormy
nights, when the tide was out, the bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the
house, resembled an immense black pit, from which ascended mutterings
and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.
At high tide the returning water assaulted the ledges of rock in short
rushes, ending in bursts of livid light and columns of spray, that flew
inland, stinging to death the grass of pastures.

The darkness came from the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the red
fires of sunset, and went on to seaward pursuing the retiring tide. The
wind dropped with the sun, leaving a maddened sea and a devastated sky.
The heavens above the house seemed to be draped in black rags, held up
here and there by pins of fire. Madame Levaille, for this evening the
servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them to depart. "An old
woman like me ought to be in bed at this late hour," she good-humouredly
repeated. The quarrymen drank, asked for more. They shouted over the
table as if they had been talking across a field. At one end four
of them played cards, banging the wood with their hard knuckles, and
swearing at every lead. One sat with a lost gaze, humming a bar of
some song, which he repeated endlessly. Two others, in a corner, were
quarrelling confidentially and fiercely over some woman, looking close
into one another's eyes as if they had wanted to tear them out, but
speaking in whispers that promised violence and murder discreetly, in a
venomous sibillation of subdued words. The atmosphere in there was thick
enough to slice with a knife. Three candles burning about the long room
glowed red and dull like sparks expiring in ashes.

The slight click of the iron latch was at that late hour as unexp