BOOK I: BERNAY-SUR-MER

-- I --

THE HOUSE ON THE BLUFF

It was a wilder gust than any that had gone before. It tore along the beach with maniacal fury; and, shrieking in a high, devilishly-gleeful falsetto, while the joints of the little inn, rheumatic with age, squeaked in its embrace, shook the Taverne du Bas Rhone much after the fashion of a terrier shaking a rat. And with that gust, loosening the dilapidated fastening on the casement, a window crashed inward, shattering the pane against the wall.

"_Sacre bleu!_" shouted a man, springing smartly to his feet from his seat at a small table as the rain lashed him. "What a dog of a night!"

Against the opposite wall, tilted back in a chair, Papa Fregeau, the patron, a rotund, aproned little individual, stopped the humming of his song.

"_Tiens!_" said he fatuously. "But it is worse than that, Alcide, since it is bad for business--hah! Not a franc profit to-night--the Bas Rhone is desolated." And he resumed his song:

"In Languedoc, where the wine flows free, We drink to----"

"Hold your bibulous tongue, Jacques Fregeau, and get something with which to fix that window before we are as wet inside as you!"--it was Madame Fregeau, stout, middle-aged and rosy, already hurrying to the aid of the first speaker, who was wrestling with the dismantled fastening.

Usually the nightly resort of the little fishing village of Bernay-sur-Mer, the Bas Rhone, inn, cabaret, tavern or cafe, as it was variously styled, now held but two others in the room that was habitually crowded to suffocation. One was a young man, sturdily built, with a tanned, clean-cut face, smooth-shaven save for a small black moustache, whose rumpled black hair straggled in pleasing disarray over his forehead; the other was older, a man of forty, whose skin was bronzed almost to blackness from the Mediterranean sun. Both were in rough fishermen's dress, sitting at dominoes under the hanging lamp in the centre of the room. On the table, pushed to one side, were the remains of a simple meal of bread and cheese; and from the inside of the loaf, the younger man, somewhat to the detriment of his own game and to the advantage of his opponent, had plucked out a piece of the soft bread, which he had kneaded between his fingers into a plastic lump, and thereafter, with amazing skill and deftness, had been engaged in moulding into little faces, and heads, and figures of various sorts, as he played.

The older man spoke slowly now:

"It is twenty years since we have had the like--you do not remember that, Jean? You were too young."

Jean Laparde, an amused smile lurking in his dark eyes as he watched Jacques Fregeau waddle obediently to his wife's side, shook his head.

"I was on the _Etoile_ that night," said the other, pulling at his beard. "The good God dealt hardly with us--we lost two when we beached; but not so hardly as with the _Antoinette_--none came to shore from her. It was a night just such as this."

"Ay, that is so," corroborated Papa Fregeau, removing his apron and stuffing it into the broken window pane. "It is, after all, small blame to any one that they stay indoors to-night and forget my profits."

"Profits!" ejaculated Madame Fregeau tartly. "You drink them all up!" She shook her short skirts, damp from her skirmish with the storm, and turned to Jean's companion at the table. "Pray the blessed Virgin," she said softly, crossing herself reverently, "that there be no boats out to-night, Pierre Lachance."

"And God for pity on them if there are!" returned the fisherman. "But there are none from Bernay-sur-Mer, that is sure." He played the last domino before him with a little triumphant flourish. "Ah, Jean, count--you are caught, my boy! It will teach you to pay more attention to the game, and less to the waste of Madame Fregeau's good bread!"

"She is used to that!" smiled Jean Laparde good-naturedly, as he faced his dominoes, disclosing the measure of his defeat, and, pushing back his chair, stood up.

"But," protested the other, "you are not going! We will play again. See, it is early, the clock has but just struck eight."

"Not to-night, Pierre," said Jean, laughing now, as he began to button his jacket around his throat. "Play with Alcide there."

"Chut!" cried Madame Fregeau, bustling forward, her eyes twinkling. "The little minx will not expect you a night like this--Marie-Louise is too sensible a girl to be piqued for that. You are not going out to-night, Jean, _ma foi_!"

"And why not?" asked Jean innocently. "Why not, Mother Fregeau? What is a little wind, and a little rain, and a little walk along the beach?"

"But a night like this!" sighed Papa Fregeau dolorously, as he joined the group, his forefinger laid facetiously against the side of his stubby little nose. "_Nom d'un nom_! What constancy--what sublime constancy!"

"Ah, you laugh at that, _mon petit bete_!" exclaimed Madame Fregeau sharply, instantly changing front. "You are an old fool, Jacques Fregeau!"

"But I was a young one once, _ma belle_--eh?" insinuated Jacques, pinching his wife's plump cheek, and winking prodigiously at Jean Laparde. "It is of that you are thinking, eh?"

"You are ridiculous!" declared Madame Fregeau, blushing and pushing him away.

"You see, Jean?" said Jacques Fregeau plaintively, shrugging his shoulders. "You see, eh, _mon gaillard_? You see what you are coming to! Oh, _la, la_, once I was young like you, and Lucille, _ma cherie_, here, was like--eh?--like Marie-Louise. You see, eh? You see what you are coming to!"

There was a roar of laughter from the man at the table in the rear, that was echoed in a guffaw by Pierre Lachance, as Jean, leaning suddenly forward, caught Madame Fregeau's comely, motherly face between his hands and kissed her on both cheeks.

"I'd ask for no better luck, Jacques!" he cried--and ran for the door.

Laughing, and with a wave of his hand back at the little group, he opened the door, closed it behind him with a powerful wrench against the wind; and then, outside, stood still for a moment, as though taken utterly by surprise at the abandon of the night. He had not been out before that day. Like all, or nearly all of Bernay-sur-Mer he had remained snugly indoors--for what was a fisherman to do in weather like that! Mend nets? Well, yes, he had mended nets. One must do that. He shrugged his shoulders, making a wry grimace. Nets! But the night was bad--much worse than he had imagined. And yet--yes--the storm was at its height now, but the wind had changed--by morning, thank the saints, it would be better.

It was black about him, inky black--all save a long, straggling, twinkling line of lights from the cottage windows that bordered the beach, and the dull yellow glow from the windows of the Bas Rhone at his side. Around him a veritable bedlam seemed loosed--the wind, like a horde of demons, shrieking, whistling and howling in unholy jubilee; while heavier, more ominous, in a deeper roar came the booming of the surf from where it broke upon the beach but little more than a hundred yards in front of him.

Jean Laparde stood hesitant. It was quite true; Mother Fregeau had been right! Marie-Louise would not expect him to-night, and it was a good mile from the village to the house on the bluff, and yet--he smiled a little, and suddenly, head down, struck out into the storm.

A flash of lightning, jagged, threw the night into a strange, tremulous luminance--the headlands of the little bay; the mighty combers, shaking their topped crests like manes, hurling themselves in impotent fury at the shore, then spreading in thin creamy layers to lick up wide, irregular patches of the beach; the sweep of the Mediterranean, so slow to anger, but a tumbling rage of waters now as far as the eye could reach; the whitewashed cottages; boats, dark objects without form or shape, drawn far up on the sand; the pale, yellowish-green of the sward stretching away behind the village; the road beneath his feet a pool of mud--and then blackness again, utter, impenetrable, absolute.

Jean passed the last of the cottages--there were but four on that side of the Bas Rhone--and kept on, following the curve of the beach toward the eastern headland. But now, the lightness of spirit that had been with him but a few moments before was gone, and a restlessness, bordering on depression, took its place. What was it? The storm? No; it could not very well be that, for it had come often to him before, unbidden, unwelcomed, that same mood--even in the glorious sunlight, even in the midst of song as he fished the blue, sparkling waters that, more than anything else, had been his home ever since he could remember. It seemed, and it was a very strange and absurd fancy, but it was always the same, that a voice, wordless, without sound, talked speciously to him, talked him into a state of discontent that robbed him of all delight in his work, his environment and his surroundings, and, arrived at that stage, would suddenly bid him peremptorily to follow--and that was all. Follow! Where? He did not know. It made him angry, but it did not in any way lighten the mood that was forced upon him in spite of himself.

And now, as it always came, unsought and unexpected, this mood was upon him again; and, as he plunged through the storm, drawing the collar of his jacket more closely around his throat against the sheets of rain, he fought with himself to shake it off. It was absurd. And why should he be unhappy for something that was absurd? That was still more absurd! He was not sick, there was nothing the matter with him. He was strong--none was stronger than he, and he had matched himself against them all in Bernay-sur-Mer. True, it was a hard life, and there were not riches to be found in the nets--but there were friends--he was rich in friends--all Bernay-sur-Mer was his friend. There were the Fregeaus, with whom he had lived at the Bas Rhone for over ten years now since his father had died. Madame Fregeau was a mother to him, and Jacques was the biggest-hearted man in the whole south of France. And, _mon Dieu_!--he began to smile now--there were--should he name every family in the village?--even to the children for whom he made the clay _poupees_, the dolls that in their play lives were, in turn, veritable children to them? Ah, to be in ugly mind--it was no less than a sin! There were candles to burn for that, and the good Father Anton would have a word to say if he knew! And best of all--there was Marie-Louise. There was none, none _pardieu_, in the whole wide sweep of France like Marie-Louise, with her eyes like stars, and her face fresh as the morning breeze across the sparkling waters, and a figure so beautiful, so lithe, so strong! What charm to see those young arms on the oars, the bosom heave, to feel the boat bound forward under the stroke, and hear her laugh ring out with the pure joy of life!

"Marie-Louise!" cried Jean Laparde aloud--and the wind seemed to catch up the words and echo them in a triumphant shout: "Marie-Louise!"

It was gone--that mood. And now, with the village well behind him, the lights blotted out and seeming to have left him isolated even from human proximity, another came--and he stood still--and this time it was the storm. And something within him, without will or volition of his, spontaneous, leapt out in consonance with the wild grandeur of the night to revel in it, atune with the Titanic magnificence of the spectacle, as one who gazes upon a splendid canvas and, innate in appreciation, is lost in the conception to which the master brush has given life. And so he stood there for a long time immovable, his shoulders thrust a little forward, the rain streaming from his face, his eyes afire, wrapt, lost in the clashing elements before him--and fancy came. The play of the lightning was more vivid now, and the coast line took on changing shapes, as though seeking by new and swiftly conceived formations to foil and combat and thrust back and parry the furious attack of the breakers that hurled themselves onward in their mad, never-ending charge; while behind again, in sudden apparitions, like spectre battalions massed in reserve, the white cottages appeared for an instant, and then, as though seeking a more strategic position, vanished utterly, until a flame-tongue crackling across the heavens searched them out again, laying their position bare once more; and the headlands, vanguards where the fight was hottest, were lost in a smother of spume and spray, like the smoke of battle swirling over them--and it was battle, and the thunder of the surf was the thunder of belching cannon, and the shriek of the wind was the shriek of hurtling shells. It was battle--and some consciousness inborn in Jean Laparde awakened and filled him with understanding, and in the terror; and dismay and awe and strife and fierce elation was the great allegory of life, and suddenly he knew a lowly reverence for Him who had depicted this, and a joy, full of a strange indefinable yearning, in the divine genius of its execution.

"It is the great art of the _bon Dieu_," said Jean simply.

And after a little while he went forward on his way again.

The road led upward now in a gentle slope toward higher land, though still following the line of the beach. Near the extremity of the headland was the cottage that the village always called the "house on the bluff," and in a moment now he should be able to see the light. There was always a light there every night, in good weather and in stormy--and never in fourteen years had it been otherwise, not since the night that Marie-Louise's father, the brother of old Gaston Bernier, steering for the headland in a gale had miscalculated his position and been drowned on the Perigeau Reef. From that day it had become a religion with Gaston, a sacred rite, that light; and, in time, it had become an institution in Bernay-sur-Mer--not a fisherman in the village now but steered by it, not one but that, failing to sight it, would have taken it for granted that he was off his course and would have put about, braving even the wildest weather, until he had picked it up.

The light! Jean smiled to himself. He was very wet, but he had found a most wonderful joy in the storm--and, besides, what did a little wetting matter? In a few minutes now Marie-Louise would cry out in delight at seeing him, and he would fling off his drenched jacket and pull up a chair to the stove beside old Gaston, and they would light their pipes, and Marie-Louise would prepare the spiced wine, and--he halted as though stunned.

He had reached the big rock where the road made its second turn and ran directly to the house--and there was no light. It was the exact spot from which he should first be able to see it--a hundred times, on a hundred nights, he had looked for it, and found it there--by the turning at the big rock. He dashed the rain from his face with a sweep of his hand, and strained his eyes into the blackness. There was nothing there--only the blackness. He reached out mechanically and touched the rock, as though to assure himself that it was there--and then he laughed a little unnaturally. There must be some mistake--for fourteen years that light had burned in the window, and it could be seen from this point on the road--there must be some mistake. Perhaps just another step would bring it into view!

And then, as he moved forward, something cold gripped at Jean's heart. There was no mistake--the light was out for the first time in fourteen years! The light that old Gaston had never failed to burn since the night his brother died, the light that had become a part of the man himself--was out! Was he ill--sick? Why, then, had Marie-Louise not lighted it? She had done it before, often and often before. But now neither one nor the other had lighted it, and they, just the two of them, were the only occupants of the house--Marie-Louise and her old uncle. Just the two of them--and the light was out!

Jean was running now, smashing his way along the road through the clayey mud and water, splashing it to his knees, buffeting against the wind; and, with every step, the sense of dread that had settled upon him grew heavier. It was no ordinary thing this! Old Gaston would have lighted the lamp while there remained strength in his body to do it; it was a sacred trust that he had imposed upon himself which had grown more inviolable as the years had crept upon him and he had grown older. It brought fear to Jean, and the greater stab at the thought of Marie-Louise. Things were wrong--and what was wrong with one was wrong with both. Was it not Marie-Louise who polished the great lamp chimney so zealously every morning and filled the big, dinted brass bowl of the lamp with oil; and was it not Marie-Louise who watched with affectionate understanding each evening as her uncle lighted it?

A shadowy mass, the house, loomed suddenly out of the darkness before him. It seemed to give him added speed, and in another moment he was at the door--and the door was open, wide open, blown inward with the wind.

"Marie-Louise!" he shouted, as he rushed inside. "Gaston! Gaston!" And again: "Marie-Louise!"

There was no answer--no sound but the shriek of wind, the groaning of the house timbers in travail with the storm. He pushed the door shut behind him, and something like a sob came from Jean's lips--and then he shouted once more.

Still there was no answer.

He felt his way to the kitchen, and across the kitchen to the shelf by the rear wall, found a candle, and lighted it. He held the flame above his head, sweeping the light about him, and, discovering nothing, ran back into the front room--and, with a low cry, stood still. On the floor the great lamp lay broken, the chimney shattered into splinters. He stared at it in a frightened, almost superstitious way. The great lamp broken! Did it mean that--no, no, it could not mean that! It was the wind that had blown it there in bursting in the door. See, there was no disorder anywhere! He ran into Gaston's room. Nothing! Nothing anywhere to indicate that anything had happened--and yet, apparently, the house was empty--and that was enough! Out? They had gone out somewhere, even in the storm, on some homely errand, to pay a visit perhaps? Impossible! With the lamp for the first time in fourteen years unlighted, and broken now upon the floor? It was impossible! While Gaston Bernier lived the light would burn!

He climbed the stairs and stood on the threshold of the little attic room, the flickering candle playing timorously with the darker shadows where the roof in its sharp angle spread into an inverted V. It was the first time he had ever looked into that room. It was Marie-Louise's room. It was all white, scrupulously white, from the bare floor to the patched quilt on the little bed. There was a freshness, a sweetness about it that seemed to personify Marie-Louise, to fill the room with her--and it swept him now with a sudden numbing agony, and his face, wet with the rain that dripped from the hair straggling over his forehead, showed grey and set as it glistened curiously in the yellow, sputtering candle light.

And then, half mad with anxiety, the sure, intuitive knowledge of disaster upon him, he rushed downstairs again; and, hurriedly exchanging his candle for a lantern, went out into the night.

A search around the house revealed no more than within. He ran then down the path to the beach, to where, well up under the protection of the low bluff and away from the reach of the highest tide, old Gaston stored his boats and fishing gear. And there, as Jean flashed his lantern around him, a low, strained cry, for the second time, came from his lips. Three boats old Gaston owned--who should know better than he, Jean Laparde, who fished with the other season after season!--but of the three boats only two were there upon the beach.

As a man wounded then and dazed with his hurt, Jean stood there. They had gone--out into that--Marie-Louise and old Gaston--and they had not come back. It was not true--it was beyond belief! No; it was not true--something only had happened to the boat--no man in Bernay-sur-Mer would have been so mad as to have ventured out!

Far to the south the heavens opened in a burst of flame, and, travelling far and fast, a zigzag tongue of lightning, like the venomous thrust of a serpent's fang, leaped across the skies. It lighted up the beach, and, further out over the waters, a quarter of a mile away, played upon the smother of spray that like a shroud flung itself over the Perigeau Reef--and the cry that came from Jean Laparde was wild, hoarse-throated now. What was that he had seen!

It was dark again out there. He swung his lantern, signalling frantically--then, holding it high and rigid, waited for the next flash.

It came.

"Marie-Louise," he whispered through white lips.

Far out on the extremity of the reef, a figure stood silhouetted against the spray for an instant--and blackness fell again.

-- II --

THE KEEPERS OF THE LIGHT

For a moment's space Jean stood there measuring, as it were, the sweep of waters, as one might measure the strength of some antagonist thrust suddenly upon him--and then, turning, he ran back to the boats, and began to drag one down the beach.

No man in all Bernay-sur-Mer would dare to venture out. He had said that himself--but there was no thought of that now. Marie-Louise was on the Perigeau Reef. He was strong, strong as a young bull, and he tugged now at the heavy boat with the added nervous strength of a man near mad with desperation, heaving it swiftly across the sand. At high tide even in calm weather the Perigeau was awash--in storm, far better to plunge into the water than to be pounded to death upon those _diable_ rocks, lifted up and pounded upon the rocks, and lifted up and pounded again, when the water should be high. At ten o'clock it would be full tide. Thanks to the _bon Dieu_ it was not eight o'clock when the water would be at its height, or else--

"_Sacre nom d'un nom, d'un nom_"--Jean was grinding words from between his teeth. They came utterly without volition, utterly meaningless, utterly spontaneous from the brain afire.

It was the lee of the headland, and it was the mercy of the _Sainte Vierge_ that it was so; otherwise, _bapteme de bapteme_! no boat could live where a fish would drown. But it was the smoother water of a mill-race--in with the tide, out with the tide--between the headland and the Perigeau it was like that.

With a wrench, Jean swung the boat around--he had been dragging it by the stern--and, at the water's edge now, the dying efforts of a spent and broken wave wrapped and curled around the bow in creamy foam. Then, racing up the beach once more to the shelter of the bluff, he knelt there to plant his lantern in the sand, ballasting it securely with rocks, flung his jacket down beside it, and ran back to the water's edge again.

He shoved the boat further out until it was half afloat, shipped the oars--and waited, steadying the craft with an iron grip on the gunwales. A wave lifted her, the water swirled around his knees, seethed behind him, rushed back hissing sharply in its retreat--and Jean, bending, shoved with all his strength, as he sprang aboard.

The boat shot out on the receding wave, and, as he flung himself upon the seat, smashed into the next oncoming breaker, wavered, half turned, righted under a mighty tug at the oars, engulfed herself in a sheet of spray--and slid onward down into the bubbling hollow.

None in Bernay-sur-Mer was a better boatman than Jean Laparde, and Bernay-sur-Mer in that respect held its head above all Languedoc; for at the water fetes now for three years had not Jean Laparde secured to it the coveted _prix_! But to-night it was a different race that lay before him.

For a little way, while the lee of the headland held, a child almost, once the boat was free of the broken surf on the beach, might have held the craft to her course--but only for that little way. For fifty yards perhaps the boat leapt forward, straight as an arrow, heading well above the Perigeau Reef--and then suddenly the lighted lantern on the beach seemed to travel seaward at an incredible speed, as the onrush of tide, wind and sea through the narrows caught the boat, twisted it like a cork, and, high-borne on a wave-crest, hurled it along past the shoreline toward the lower end of the bay--and the twinkling lantern was blotted out from sight. Tight-lipped, his muscles cracking with the strain, Jean forced the boat around again, and the tough oars bent under his strokes.

There were two ways to the Perigeau Reef--he had thought of both of them. One, to go down in the shelter of the headland to the lower end of the bay, circuit the shore-line there until he was free of the mill-race through the narrows, then pull straight out for the Perigeau--only, the _bon Dieu_ knew well, no man was strong enough for that; it was too far, for the bay on this side, deeper than on the other side of the headland by Bernay-sur-Mer, extended inward for nearly two miles, and to pull back that distance against the full force of the storm--only a madman would try it, and no boat would live! The other way was the only chance--the quarter mile across the narrows.

A quarter mile! He pulled on and on, minute after minute that were as endless periods of time; and whether he was making progress or losing it he did not know, only that with each minute his strength was being taxed to the utmost, until it seemed to be ebbing from him, until his arms in their sockets caused him brutal pain. And it was all like a black veil that wrapped itself about him now, blacker than it had ever been before that night--the loss of that tiny guiding light he had left upon the beach seemed to make it so, and seemed to try to rob him of his courage because it was gone. The never-ending roar of buffeting sea and surf was in his ears until his head rang with the sound--the waves pounded his boat and tossed it like a chip upon their crests, and slopped aboard and sloshed at his feet--and they thundered upon the shore, and upon the headland, and they were mocking at him. The lightning came again--it lighted up the house upon the bluff and with bitter dismay he saw that, too, was sweeping seaward--it flickered a ghostly radiance upon dancing shore shapes--it played upon a tumbling wall of water, onrushing, towering above his head from where the boat quivered in the trough far down below. And at sight of this, like a madman, Jean Laparde pulled then--up--up--up--the crest was curling, snarling its vengeance before it broke--and then it seethed away in a great trail of murmuring foam that lapped at the boat's sides and crept in over the gunwales. And there were many more like that, so many that they were countless--and they never stopped--and they were stronger than he--and there was always another--and each was greater than the one before--and he sobbed at last in utter weakness over the oars.

Marie-Louise, Gaston, the Perigeau, all were living before him in a daze now--the brain became subordinate to the bodily exhaustion. There was only a jumbled medley of hell and death and eternal struggle around him, and a subconsciousness that for him too the end had come--the good Father Anton would say a requiem mass for him--and Bernay-sur-Mer would tell its children that Jean would never make any more of the clay _poupees_ for them--and the children would cry--and it was all very droll.

He pulled on, mechanically, doggedly. His face was wrinkled where the muscles twisted in pain, drops that were not rain nor spray stood out in great beads upon his forehead, his back seemed breaking, his arms useless things that writhed with the strain upon them.

Wild thoughts came to him. Why should he struggle there against the pitiless strength that was greater than his, until he could no longer even meet the waves with the bow of his boat, until they would turn him over and over and afterwards roll him upon the shore, where Papa Fregeau, perhaps, would find him! See, it would be a very easy matter to stop while he had yet a little strength left to guide the boat--and run with the waves--and it would rest him--and by the time he got to the shore he would be quite strong enough again to fight his way through the breakers. His lips moved, teeth working over them, biting into them, tinging them with blood. It came out of this hell and these storm devils around him, that thought! Marie-Louise was waiting, was she not, upon the Perigeau--and when the tide was high and the sea was calm one could row over the Perigeau, and sometimes see a _dragonet_, with the beautiful blue and yellow marking on its white scaleless body, looking for food in the rock crevices out of its curious eyes that were in the top of its head!

A flicker of light! Yes--yes--the lantern! He was abreast of it again. The good God had not deserted him! He was still strong--there was iron in his arms again--the torture of pulling was gone. He could feel the boat lift now to the stroke.

He pulled, taking his breath in catchy sobs. The boat swept downward into a great trough, rose again, trembling, balancing on the next crest--and the light had disappeared. A cry gurgled from Jean's throat, impotent, full of anguish. It was an hallucination, a torture of the devil! No! There it was once more--he caught it on the next rise, and each succeeding one now. And he, not it now, was making headway seaward. He was across the tide-race, it was the Madonna who had prayed for him! and in another little while, soon now, just as soon as the lantern showed a little further astern, he would get the lee of the Perigeau itself--it would be broken water, but it would be like a child's effort then. And that!--what was that!

"Jean!"--it came ringing down with the wind, a brave, strong voice. "_Jean!_"

It was Marie-Louise! His strength was the strength of a god again. He shot a hurried glance over his shoulder--it was done--but one had need for care that the boat should not thrash itself to pieces on the rocks. Yes; he saw her now--like a dark, wind-swept wraith.

"To the right, Jean--there is landing to the right!" she called.

"Ay!" he shouted back; and, standing, swung in the boat.

The bow touched the edge of the rocks, grated, pounded, receded, and came on again--there was no beach here--only the vicious swirl and chop of the back-eddy. But as the keel touched again, Jean sprang over into the water; and as he sprang, a figure from the rocks rushed in waist deep to grasp the boat's gunwale on the other side--and across the bow, very close to him, Marie-Louise's white face was framed in the night. It was very dark, he could not see her features distinctly, but he had never seen Marie-Louise look like that before--it was not that her face was aged, nothing, _bon Dieu_! could take the springtime from that face, but it was very tired, and frightened, and glad, and full of grief.

"Jean, ah, Jean, you--" the wind carried away her words. Then she shouted louder, a curious break, like a half sob, in her voice. "Uncle Gaston is hurt--very, very badly hurt. He is up there a little way on the reef. You must carry him. And if you hurry, Jean, I can hold the boat."

"Gaston--hurt!" he cried in dismay. "You are sure then you can hold the boat, and--"

"Yes, yes, if you hurry, Jean--he is there, a few yards back, a little to the left."

"Guard yourself then that it does not pull you off your feet!" he cautioned anxiously, and began to scramble from the water and up the slippery, weeded rocks.

And then, a few yards back on the ledge, as she had said, just out of the reach of the spray that lashed the windward side of the Perigeau, he came upon an outstretched form--and, kneeling, called the other's name:

"Gaston! It is I--Jean Laparde!" He bent closer--one could not hear for the _diable_ wind! "Gaston!" There was only a low moaning--the man was unconscious. "_'Cre nom d'une forte peine!_" muttered Jean, with a sinking heart, and picked up the other tenderly in his arms.

But it was not easy, that little way back to the boat. Burdened now, the wind behind his back sent him staggering forward before he could find footing, and ten times in the dozen steps he lurched, slipped and all but fell before, close to the boat again, he laid Gaston down upon the rocks.

"We must bale out the boat, Marie-Louise," he shouted, wading quickly into the water; "or with what we take in on the way back she will not ride. See, I will hold it while you bale--it will be easier for you."

She answered something as she set instantly to work, but her words were lost in the storm. And Jean, through the darkness, as he gripped at the boat, watched her, his mind a sea of turmoil like the turmoil of the sea about him. Gaston was hurt--yes, very badly hurt, it would seem--how had it happened?--how had they come, Marie-Louise and Gaston, to be upon the Perigeau?--and he, who had given up hope, who had thought to perish out there in that crossing, he, too, was on the Perigeau--the way to get back was to run straight in with the bay--it would not be so hard if they could out-race the waves--if the waves came in over the stern it would be to swamp and--God had been very good to let them live and--

Marie-Louise's hand closed over his on the gunwale.

"It is done, Jean--what I could do," she said. "I will hold the boat again while you lift Uncle Gaston in."

And suddenly Jean's heart was very full.

"Marie-Louise, Marie-Louise!" he said hoarsely--and while her hands grasped the rocking boat, his crept around the wet shoulders for an instant, and to her face, and turned the face upward to his, and, in that wild revelry of storm, kissed her; and with a choked sob he went from her then and picked up the unconscious form upon the rocks.

And so they started back.

There was no sweep of tide to battle with now--the waves bore them high and shot them onward, shoreward; and the storm was wings to them. But there was danger yet; on the top of the crests it was like a pivot, each one threatening to whirl them broadside and capsize them on the breathless rush down the steep slope that yawned below--that, and the fear that the downward rush, breathless as it was, would not be fast enough to escape the crest itself, which, following them always, hanging over them like hesitant doom far up above, trembling, twisting, writhing, might break in a seething torrent and, sweeping over them, engulf them. It was not so hard now, the way back, there was not the pitiless current that numbed the soul because the body was so frail; but all the craft Jean knew, all the strength that was his was in play again.

The boat swept onward. Marie-Louise was crouched in the stern supporting Gaston's head upon her lap. Jean could not see her face. When he dared take his eyes for an instant from the racing waves behind her, he looked at her, but he could not see her face--it was bent always over Gaston's head. And a fear grew heavy in Jean's heart--the old fisherman had not moved since he, Jean, had found the other on the reef. Once he shouted at Marie-Louise, shouted out the fear that was upon him--but she only shook her head.

The rain had stopped--he noticed the fact with a strange shock of surprise--surprise that he had not noticed it before, as though it were something extraneous to his surroundings. And then he remembered that as he had stood outside the Bas Rhone he had seen that the wind had changed, and had told himself that by morning it would be better weather. He glanced above him. The storm wrack was still there; but it was broken now, and the low, flying clouds seemed thinner--yes, by morning it would be bright sunshine, and of the storm only the heavy sea would be left.

He gave his eyes to the tumbling waters again--and, suddenly, with a great cry, began to pull until it seemed his arms must break. Roaring behind them, a giant wave was on the point of breaking--closer it came--closer--he yelled to Marie-Louise:

"Hold fast, Marie-Louise! Hold fast!"

And then it was upon them.

For a moment it was a vortex--a white, swirling flood of water churned to lather. It hid the stern of the boat, hid Marie-Louise and Gaston at her feet, as it poured upon them--and the boat, lifted high up, hung dizzily for an instant, poised as on the edge of an abyss, then the wave rolled under them, and the boat swept on in its wake, the shipped water rushing now this way now that in the bottom.

It was an escape! The blessed saints still had them in their keeping! Jean sucked in his breath. A foot nearer when the wave had broken, and, instead of the few bucketsful they had taken, the boat would have filled! And now Marie-Louise, already baling at the water, cried out to him.

"See! It was a mercy!"--her voice rang with a glad uplift. "It was sent by the _bon Dieu_, that wave! It has brought life to Uncle Gaston!"

It was true. The deluge of water had, temporarily at least, restored the old fisherman to consciousness, for he raised himself up now, and Jean heard him speak.

After that, time marked no definite passing for Jean. Occasionally he heard Marie-Louise's voice as she spoke to her uncle; and occasionally he heard the old fisherman reply--but that was all. In nearer the shore, where the current rushing through the narrows had lost its potency, he edged the boat across the heavy sea, gained the comparative calm under the lee of the headland, and began to work back to the upper end--it was easier that way, difficult and slow as the progress was, than to land and carry old Gaston along the beach. An hour? It might have been that--or two--or half an hour--when he and Marie-Louise, in the water beside him again, and close by where the lantern under the bluff still burned as he had left it, were dragging the boat free from the breakers and up upon the sand.

And then, while Marie-Louise ran for the lantern, Jean leaned over into the boat.

"Gaston!" he called. "See, we are back! Can you hear me?"

"Yes," Gaston answered feebly.

"Then put your arms around my neck, _mon brave_, and I will lift you up."

The arms rose slowly, clasped; and Jean, straightening up, was holding the other as a woman holds a child. Gaston's head fell on his shoulder, and the old fisherman whispered weakly in his ear.

"My side, Jean--hold me--lower--down."

"But, yes," Jean answered cheerily. "There--is that better. We shall get easily to the house like this, and Marie-Louise"--she was back again now--"will lead the way with the lantern."

Gaston's only answer was a slight pressure of his arm around Jean's neck--but now, as the lantern's rays for an instant fell upon the other's features, Jean's own face set like stone. The old fisherman's eyes were closed, and the skin, where it showed through the grizzled beard, wet and tangled now, was a deathly white--and Jean, motioning to Marie-Louise, started hurriedly forward.

Only once on the way to the house, as Jean followed Marie-Louise up the path from the beach, did Gaston speak again; and then it was as though he were talking to himself, his tones low and broken, almost like the sobbing of a child. Jean caught the words.

"Rene--Rene, my brother--the light is out, Rene--the light is out."

And with the words, something dimmed suddenly before Jean's eyes, and the path, for a moment, and Marie-Louise were as a mist in front of him. The light! For fourteen years the man he held in his arms had burned that light--and the light was out now forever.

He hurried on, and, reaching the house, laid Gaston on the bed in the little room off the kitchen that belonged to the other; then turned swiftly to Marie-Louise, for the old fisherman had lost consciousness again.

"Cognac, Marie-Louise!" he said quickly.

She ran for the brandy--and while Jean forced a few drops through Gaston's lips, holding up the lantern to watch the other, she went from the room again and brought back a lamp.

"Jean," she cried pitifully, as she set it upon the table, "he is not--"

Jean shook his head.

"No; he will be better in a minute now. It is but a little fainting spell."

She did not answer--barefooted, the short skirt just reaching to the ankles, her black hair, loosened, tumbling about her shoulders in a sodden mass, she came a little closer to the bed, her hands clasped, the dark eyes wide with troubled tenderness, the red lips parted, the white cheeks still glistening with spray; and, unconscious of her pose, the wet clothes, untrammelled in their simplicity, clinging closely to her limbs and her young rounded bosom, revealed in chaste freedom the perfect contour and beauty of her form.

Something stirred Jean's spirit within him, and for a moment he was oblivious to his surroundings; for, as he looked, she seemed to stand before him the living counterpart of a wondrous piece of sculpture, in bronze it was, marvellously conceived, that he had dreamed of again and again in vague, restless dreams--the statue, for it was always the same statue in his dreams, that was set in the midst of a great city, in a great square, and--

"Marie-Louise!" he said aloud unconsciously.

But she shook her head, pointing to the bed.

Gaston had stirred, and, opening his eyes now, fixing them on the glass still held in Jean's hand, he motioned for more brandy. And Jean, his moment of abstraction gone as quickly as it had come, bent hastily forward and gave it to him.

The raw spirit brought a flush to the old fisherman's cheeks.

"Father Anton," he said. "Go for Father Anton."

"_Bien sur!_" responded Jean soothingly. "I will go at once. It was what I thought of when I was carrying you up the beach. I said: 'Since there is no doctor in Bernay-sur-Mer, I will get Father Anton, who is as good a doctor as he is a priest, and he will have Gaston here on his feet again by morning.'" He moved away from the bed--but Gaston put out his hand and stopped him.

"Not you, Jean; I want to talk to you--Marie-Louise will go."

"Marie-Louise!" exclaimed Jean, shaking his head. "But no! You have forgotten the storm, Gaston--and, see, she is all wet and tired, and she has been, I do not know how many hours, exposed out there on that cursed Perigeau."

A smile, half stubborn, half of pride, struggled through a twist of pain on the old fisherman's lips.

"And what of that! She has been brought up to it. A dozen times and more she has been longer in a storm than this. She is not of the milk-and-water breed is Marie-Louise, she is a Bernier, and, the _bon Dieu_ be praised, the Berniers do not stop for that! Is it not so, Marie-Louise?"

"Yes, uncle," she answered softly. "I will go; and I will not be long."

"Go then, Marie-Louise," he said. "I wish it."

She bent and kissed him, and picked up the lantern, and shook her head in a pretty gesture at Jean, as though half to tease him for the perturbed look upon his face, and half in grave wistfulness to charge him with the sick man's care--and then she went from the room, and presently the front door closed behind her.

The lamp flickered with the inrush of wind from the opening of the door--flickered over a spotless bare floor, an incongruous high-poster bed that had been a wedding gift to Marie-Louise's father and mother from the man who lay upon it now, flickered over the raftered ceiling, the scant furnishings which were a single chair and a table, flickered over a crucifix upon the wall--and then burned on once more in a steady flame. It was like the shrug of Jean's shoulders, the flicker of that lamp; for, with the shrug, he resumed again his former position over Gaston--it was true after all, Marie-Louise would come to no harm, they were used to that, they fisherfolk of Bernay-sur-Mer.

"_Tiens_, Gaston!" he said. "See, we will get off your wet clothes, and you will tell me how it happened this _misere_, and about the hurt. But first this--_mon Dieu!_--but I did not guess it was like that--a clean bandage, eh?--that is first--I will find something"--he had unbuttoned the other's jacket, disclosing a rent shirt, and, on the left side, a wad of cloth, blood-soaked now, where Marie-Louise evidently had made a pad for the wound with her underskirt, and had tied it in place with long strips torn from the garment. He began to loosen one of the strips; but Gaston, who until then had lain passive with eyes closed, caught his hand.

"Let it alone, Jean--you will only make it bleed the more."

"Ay," agreed Jean thoughtfully; "perhaps that is so. It would be better maybe to leave it for Father Anton."

A wan smile came to Gaston's lips.

"Father Anton will not touch it either, Jean."

And then Jean, with a sudden start, stared into the other's eyes.

"It is destiny!" said Gaston slowly. "Did you, too, like Marie-Louise, think it was for that I sent for the good father? It is the priest and Mother Church I need, there is no doctor that could help."

"But, no!" Jean protested anxiously. "You must not talk like that, Gaston! It is not so! Wait! You will see! Father Anton will tell you that in a few days you will be strong again. It is the weakness now."

Gaston shook his head.

"You are a brave man, Jean, but I, too, am brave--and I am not afraid--not afraid for myself--it is for Marie-Louise--it is for that I kept you here and sent her for Father Anton. I know--something is hurt inside--I am bleeding there."

And now Jean made no answer--no words would come. The utter weakness in the voice, the feeble movements of the hands, the greyer pallor in the other's face seemed to dawn upon him with its full significance for the first time--and for a moment it seemed to stun and bewilder him.

"It is destiny!" said Gaston again. "Listen! It is fourteen years since Rene, my brother, Marie-Louise's father, was drowned on the Perigeau. I swore that night that through neither God nor devil should another lose his life as Rene had--and for fourteen years I burned the light, and laughed at the Perigeau as it gnawed its teeth in the storms." He stopped, and touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. "It is the hand of God," he whispered hoarsely, "The light is out--and it is the Perigeau again."

Jean pulled the chair closer to the bed, and took one of Gaston's hands.

"It means nothing that, Gaston," he said, trying to control his voice. "It is bad to think such thoughts--and of what good are they? You must not think of that. Tell me what happened, how you and Marie-Louise came to be out there to-night."

Gaston lay quiet for a little while--so long that Jean thought the other had not heard the question. Then the old fisherman spoke again.

"Marie-Louise will tell you. I have other things to say, and I have not strength enough for all. It is hard to talk. Give me the cognac again, Jean."

He drank almost greedily this time, and, as Jean held up his head that he might do so the more readily, the grim old lips and unflinching eyes smiled back their thanks.

"Listen to me well, Jean," he went on earnestly. "Marie-Louise is very dear to me. I love the little girl. All her life she has lived with me--for two years after she was born in this house here, her mother and Rene and I--and two years more with Rene and I--and then, after that, it was just Marie-Louise and I alone. She had no one else--and I had no one else. I have taught her as the _bon Dieu_ has shown me the way to teach her to be a true daughter of France--to love God and be never afraid. Jean"--he reached out his other hand suddenly and clasped it over Jean's--"do you love Marie-Louise?"

"Yes," said Jean simply.

"She will be alone now," said Gaston, and his eyes filled. "She is a good girl, Jean. She is pure and innocent, and her heart is so full of love, there was never such love as hers, and she is so gay and bright like the flowers and like the birds--and happy--and sorrow has not come to her." He stopped once more, and the grey eyes searched Jean's face as though they would read to the other's soul. "Jean," he asked again, "do you love Marie-Louise?"

Jean's lips were quivering now.

"Yes," he answered. "You know I love her."

The old fisherman lay back, silent, still for a moment, but he kept pressing Jean's hand. When he spoke again, it seemed that it was with more of an effort.

"This house, the land, the boats, the nets, they are hers--it is her _dot_. But it is not of that, I fear--it is not of that--" his voice died away. Again he was silent; and then, suddenly, raising himself on his elbow: "Jean," he asked for the third time, almost fiercely now, "do you love Marie-Louise?"

"But yes, Gaston," said Jean gently. "I have loved her all my life."

"Yes; it is so," Gaston muttered slowly. "I give her to you then, Jean--she is a gift to you from the sea--from the sea to-night. She loves you, Jean--she has told me so. You will be good to her, Jean?"

The tears were in Jean's eyes.

"Gaston, can you ask it?" he cried out brokenly.

"Ay!" said Gaston, and his voice rang out in a strange, stern note, and his form, as he lifted himself up once more, seemed to possess again its old rugged strength. "Ay--I do more than ask it. Swear it, Jean! To a dying man and in God's presence, see, there is a crucifix there, swear that you will guard her and that you will let no harm come to her."

"I swear it, Gaston," said Jean, in a choking voice.

"It is well, then," Gaston murmured--and lay back upon the bed.

For a little while, Jean, dim-eyed, watched the other, a hundred reminiscences of their work together stabbing at his heart, and then he rose and began to remove what he could of the old fisherman's clothing.

"I will not touch the wound, Gaston," he said; "but the boots, _mon brave_, and--"

Gaston did not answer. He appeared to have sunk into a semi-stupor, from which even the removal of his clothes did not arouse him. Jean pulled a blanket up around the other's form, and sat down again in the chair.

Once, as Gaston muttered, Jean leaned forward toward the other.

"It is destiny--the Perigeau--the light is out--Rene, it is--" The words trailed off into incoherency.

The minutes passed. Occasionally, with a spoon now, Jean poured a few drops of brandy between Gaston's lips; otherwise, he sat there, his head in his hands, tight-lipped, staring at the floor. Outside, that vicious howl of wind seemed to have died away--perhaps it was hushed because old Gaston was like this--Marie-Louise had been gone a long time--presently she and Father Anton would be back, and--

He looked up to find Gaston's eyes open and fixed upon him feverishly, the lips struggling to say something.

"What is it, Gaston?" he asked.

"The light, Jean," Gaston whispered. "It is--for--the last time. Go and--light--the--great lamp."

"Yes, Gaston," Jean answered, and went from the room--but at the door he covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook like a child whose heart is broken, as his feet in that outer room crunched on the shattered glass of the lamp that would never burn again. He dashed the tears from his eyes, and for a moment stared unseeingly before him, then turned and went back to Gaston's side again in the inner room.

Gaston's eyes searched his face eagerly.

"It burns?" he cried out.

"It burns," said Jean steadily.

And Gaston smiled, and the stupor fell upon him again.

And then after a long time Jean heard footsteps without, then the opening of the front door--and then it seemed to Jean that a benediction had fallen upon the room.

Framed in the doorway, a little worn black bag in his hand, his _soutane_ splashed high with mud though it was caught up now around his waist with a cord, stood Father Anton, the beloved of all Bernay-sur-Mer. And, as he stood there and the kindly blue eyes searched the figure on the bed, the fine old face, under its crown of silver hair, grew very grave--and without moving from his position he beckoned to Jean.

"Jean, my son," he said softly, "make our little Marie-Louise here put on dry clothing. I will be a little while with Gaston alone."

Marie-Louise was standing behind the priest. Father Anton stepped aside for Jean to pass--and then the door dosed quietly.

"Jean!"--she caught his arm. "Jean tell me!"

Jean did not answer--there were no words with which to answer her.

"Oh, Jean!" she said--and a little sob broke her voice.

"Go and put on dry things, Marie-Louise," he said.

"No--not now," she answered. "Give me your hand."

They stood there in the darkness. He felt her hand tremble. Neither spoke. Father Anton's voice, in a low, constant murmur, came to them now.

Her hand tightened.

"I know," she said. "It is the Sacrament."

"He said he had taught you to be never afraid," said Jean.

Her hand tightened again.

It was a long while. And then the door behind them opened, and Father Anton came between them, and drew Marie-Louise's head to his bosom and stroked her hair, and placed his other arm around Jean's shoulders--and for a moment he stood like that--and then he drew them to the window.

"See, my children," he said gently, "there are the stars, and there is peace after the storm. It is so with sorrow, for out of the blackness of grief God brings us comfort in His own good pleasure. He has called Gaston home."

-- II --

THE BEACON

It was half clay, half mud; but out of it one could fashion the little _poupees_, the dolls for the children. They would not last very long, it was true; but then one fashioned them quickly, and there was delight in making them.

Jean dug a piece of the clay with his sheaf knife, leaned over from the bank of the little creek, and moistened it in the water. He dug another, moistened that, moulded the two together--and Marie-Louise smiled at him a little tremulously, as their eyes met.

The tears were very near to those brave dark eyes since three days ago. Jean mechanically added a third piece of clay to the other two. Much had happened in those three days--all Bernay-sur-Mer seemed changed since that afternoon when Gaston, so Marie-Louise had told him, seeing a boat adrift and fearing there might be some one in it, had tried during a lull in the storm to reach it with her assistance, and an oar had broken, and the tide on the ebb had driven them close to the Perigeau where they had swamped, and somehow Gaston had been flung upon the outer edges of the reef, and the boat, sodden, weighted, following, had crushed him against the rocks.

Jean looked at Marie-Louise again. She was all in black now--she and good Mother Fregeau had made the dress between them for the church that morning, when Father Anton had said the mass for Gaston. But Marie-Louise was not looking at him--her elbows were on the ground, her chin was cupped in her hands, and the long black lashes veiled her eyes. She had not told him any more of the story--Jean could picture that for himself. How many times must she have risked her life to have pulled Gaston to the rocks higher up upon the reef! A daughter of France, Gaston had called her. _Bon Dieu_, but she was that, with her courage and her strength! One would not think the strength was there, but then the black dress did not cling like the wet clothes that other night to show the litheness of the rounded limbs.

His fingers began to work into the clay, unnaturally diffident and hesitant at first, not with the deft certainty of their custom, but as though groping tentatively for something that was curiously intangible, that eluded them. Marie-Louise, as she had been that night, was living before him again--the lines of her form so full of grace and so beautiful, so full of the virility of her young womanhood, the shapely head, the hair streaming in abandon about her shoulders--and it was like and yet not like that great bronze statue so often in his dreams, imaginary and yet so real, that was set in the midst of that great city in a great square. And then suddenly, strangely, of their own volition, it seemed, his fingers, where they had been hesitant before, began now to work with a sure swiftness.

His eyes were drinking in the contour of Marie-Louise's face in a rapt, eager, subconscious way. There was something deeper there than the mere prettiness of feature, something that was impressing itself in an absorbing, insistent way upon him. Her face made him think of the face of that statue--there was a hint of masculinity that brought with it no coarseness, nor robbed it of its sweetness or its charm, but like that massive face of bronze that towered high, that people with uplifted heads stood and gazed upon, that none passed by without a pause, stamped it with calm fearlessness; and courage and resolve outshone all else and alone was dominant there.

Marie-Louise sat up suddenly from the ground and turned toward him, her brows gathered in a pretty, puzzled way.

"Why do you look at me like that, Jean?" she demanded abruptly. "And what are you doing there? It is not the doll you promised to make for little Ninon Lachance--it is much too big." She leaned forward. "What are you making?"

"_Ma foi_!" Jean muttered, with a little start--and stared at the lump of clay. "I--I do not know."

"Well, then," said Marie-Louise gravely, "don't do any more. I want to talk to you, Jean."

"How, not do any more!" protested Jean whimsically. "Was it not you who said, 'We will go to the creek this afternoon and make _poupees_'? And look"--he jerked his hand toward a large basket on the ground beside him--"to do that I shall perhaps not keep my promise to meet the _Lucille_ when she comes in and bring a panier of fish to Jacques Fregeau at the Bas Rhone. And now you say, 'Don't do any more'!"

"Yes; I know," admitted Marie-Louise. "But I want to talk to you. Listen, Jean. To-morrow Mother Fregeau must go back to the Bas Rhone. She has been too long away in her kindness now. You know how she came to me the next morning after Uncle Gaston died, and put her arms around me and has stayed ever since."

Jean shifted the lump of clay a little away from Marie-Louise, but his fingers still worked on.

"She has a heart of gold," asserted Jean. "Who should know any better than I, who have lived with her all these years?"

Marie-Louise's eyes travelled slowly in a half tender, half pensive way over Jean. His coat was off; the loose shirt was open at the neck displaying the muscular shoulders, and the sleeves were rolled up over the brown, tanned arms; the powerful hands, powerful for all their long, slim, tapering fingers, worked on and on; the black hair clustered truantly, as it always did, over the broad, high forehead. She had known Jean all her life, as many years as she could remember, and her love for him was very deep. It had come to seem her life, that love; and each night in her prayers she had asked the _bon Dieu_ to bless and take care of Jean, and to make her a good wife to him when that time should come. It was so great, that love, that sometimes it frightened her--somehow it was frightening her now, for there was a side to Jean that, well as she knew him, she felt intuitively she had never been able to understand.

She spoke abruptly again, a little absently.

"I do not know yet what I am to do. There is the house, and Father Anton says I must not live there alone."

"But, no!" agreed Jean. "Of course not! That is what I say, too. It is all the more reason why we should not wait any longer, you and I, Marie-Louise."

A tinge of colour crept shyly into Marie-Louise's face, as she shook her head.

"No; we must wait, Jean. It is too soon after--after poor Uncle Gaston."

"But it was Gaston's wish, that," persisted Jean gently. "Have I not told you what he said, _petite_?"

Again Marie-Louise shook her head.

"But one is sad for all that," she answered. "And to go to the church, Jean, when one is sad, when one should go so happy! Oh, I want to be happy then, Jean. I do not want to think of anything that day but only you, Jean--and sing, and there must be sunshine and fete. But now, for a little while, it is Uncle Gaston. You do not think that wrong?"

"No," said Jean slowly, "it is not wrong, and I understand; but then, too, Gaston would understand, for it was his wish."

Marie-Louise bent forward with a strange little impulsive movement.

"That is twice you have said that, Jean," she said. "I--I almost wish Uncle Gaston had not said what he did to you that night. Jean, it--it is not what he said, nor what you said to him. That must not make any difference. Never, never, Jean! One does not marry for that--it is only if there is love."

"_Mais, 'cre nom_!" exclaimed Jean, suddenly setting aside his clay and catching Marie-Louise's face between his hands. "Why do you talk like that? What queer fancies are in that little head? Now, tell me"--he kissed her lips, while the blood rushed crimson to her cheeks--"tell me, is that not answer enough? And have we not loved each other long before that night, and does not all Bernay-sur-Mer know that it will dance at the _noces_?"

"Yes," whispered Marie-Louise, a little breathlessly.

"Ah, then," said Jean tenderly, "you must not talk like that. What, Marie-Louise, if I should say to myself, 'now perhaps Marie-Louise has not loved me all these years, and--'"

She drew hurriedly away.

"Don't, Jean!" she said quickly. "It hurts, that! I love you so much that sometimes I am afraid. And to-day I am afraid. I do not know why. And sometimes it is so different. That night on the reef when I thought that soon the rocks would be covered and that there was no help for Uncle Gaston and myself, and that no one could come to us even if we were seen, I saw your lantern and the _bon Dieu_ told me it was you and I had no more fear. I was so sure then--so sure then. Oh, Jean, you must be very good to me to-day. It--it was so hard"--the dark eyes were swimming now with tears--"to say good-bye to Uncle Gaston. Perhaps it is that that is making me feel so strangely. But sometimes it seems as though it could never be, the great happiness for you and me, it is so great to think about that--that it frightens me. And I have wanted to talk to you about it, Jean, often and often. Does it make you very glad and happy, too, to think of just you and me together here, and our home, and the fishing, and--and years and years of it?"

"But, yes; of course!" smiled Jean; and, picking up the clay again, began to scrape at it with his knife.

"But are you sure, Jean?"--there was a little tremor in her voice. "I do not mean so much that you are sure you love me, but that you are sure you would always be happy to stay here in Bernay-sur-Mer. You are not like the other men."

"How not like them?" Jean demanded, surveying in an absorbed sort of way the little clay figure that was taking on rough outline now. "How not like them?"

"Well--that!"--Marie-Louise pointed at the clay in his hands. "That, for one thing--that you are always playing with, that it seems you cannot put aside for an instant, even though I asked you to a moment ago. You are always making the _poupees_, and if not the _poupees_ with mud and dirt, then you must waste the inside of Mother Fregeau's loaves that she bakes herself, or steal the dough before it reaches the oven to keep your fingers busy making little faces and droll things out of it."

Jean looked up to stare at Marie-Louise a little perplexedly.

"_Mais, zut_!" he exclaimed. "And what of that! And if I amuse myself that way, what of that? It is nothing!"

"Nevertheless," Marie-Louise insisted, nodding her head earnestly, "it is true what I have said--that you are not like the other men in Bernay-sur-Mer. Do you think that I have not watched you, Jean? And have you not said little things to show that you grow tired of the fishing?"

"But that is true of everybody," Jean protested. "Does not Father Anton say that all the world is poor because there is none in it who is contented? And if I grumble sometimes, do not all the others do the same? Pierre Lachance will swear to you twice every hour that the fishing is a dog's life."

She shook her head.

"It is different," she said. "You are not Pierre Lachance, Jean, and I want you to be happy all your life--that is what I ask the _bon Dieu_ for always in my prayers. And I do not know why these thoughts come, and I do not understand them, only I know that they are there."

"Then--_voila_! We will drive them away, and they must never come back!" Jean burst out, half gaily, half gravely. "See, now, Marie-Louise"--he caught her hand in both of his, putting aside the lump of clay again--"it is true that sometimes I am like that, and I do not understand either; but one must take things as they are, is that not so?"

She nodded--a little doubtfully.

"Well, then," cried Jean, "why should I not be happy here? Have I not you, and is that not most of all? And as for the rest, do I not do well with the fishing? Is there any who does better? Do they not speak of the luck of Jean Laparde? _'Cre nom_! Different from the others! Who is a fisherman if it is not I, who have been a fisherman all my life? And of what good is it to wish for anything else? What else, even if I wanted to, could I do? I do not know anything else but the boats and the nets. Is it not so, Marie-Louise?"

"Y-yes," she said, and her eyes lifted to meet his.

"And happy!" he went on. "Ah, Marie-Louise, with those bright eyes of yours that belong all to me, who could be anything but happy? _Tiens_! You are to be my little wife, and Bernay-sur-Mer and the blue water is to be our home, and we will fish together, and you shall sing all day in the boat, and--well, what more is there to ask for?"

"Oh, Jean!"--she was smiling now.

"There, you see!" said Jean, and burst out laughing. "Marie-Louise is herself again, and--_pouf_!--the blue devils are blown away. And now wait until I have finished this, and I will show you something"--he picked up the clay once more. "Only you must not look until it is done."

"Mustn't I? Oh!"--with a little _moue_ of resignation. "Well, then, hurry, Jean," she commanded, and cupped her chin in her hands again, her elbows propped upon the ground.

It was playfully that Jean turned his back upon her, hiding his work, but as his fingers began again to draw and model the clay and his knife to chisel it, the smile went slowly from his face and his lips grew firmly closed. It was strange that Marie-Louise should have known! It was true, the fishing grew irksome too often now; for those moods, like the mood in the storm, came very often, much more often than they had been wont to do. He had laughed at her, but that was only to pretend, to chase the sadness away and make her eyes shine again. It was true, too, as he had told her, that one must take things as they were. Whether he wanted to fish or not, he must fish--_voila_! How else could one make the _sous_ with which to live?

Oh, yes, he had laughed to make her laugh; but now, _pardieu_! it was bringing that mood upon himself. Where was that great city and that great square, and what was that great statue before which the people stood rapt and spellbound, and why should it come so often to his thoughts and be so real as though it were a very truth and not some queer imagination of his brain? There were wonderful things in the face of that bronze figure. He leaned a little forward toward the clay before him, his lips half parted now, his fingers seeming to tingle with a life, throbbing, palpitant, that was all their own, that was apart from him entirely, for they possessed a power of movement and a purpose that he had nothing to do with. He became absorbed in his work, lost in it. Time passed.

"Jean," Marie-Louise called out, "let me see it now."

"Wait!" he said almost harshly. "Wait! Wait! Wait!"

"_Jean_!"--it was a hurt little cry.

He did not hear her. There was something at the base of that statue of his dreams that always troubled him, that the people always pointed at as they gazed; but he had never been able to make out what it was there at the base of the statue. It was very strange that he was never able to see that, when he could see the figure of the woman with the wonderful face so plainly!

He worked on and on. There were neither hours nor minutes--the afternoon deepened. There was no creek, no Marie-Louise, no Bernay-sur-Mer, nothing--only those dreams and the little clay figure in his hands.

And then Marie-Louise, her face a little white, timidly touched his arm.

"Jean!" she said hesitantly.

Her voice roused him. It seemed as though he was awakened from a sleep. He brushed the hair back from his eyes, and looked around.

"_Mon Dieu_," he said, "but that was, strange!" And then he smiled, still a little dazed, and lifted around the clay figure for her to see. "I do not know if it is finished," he said, staring at it; "but perhaps I could do no better with it even if I worked longer."

Marie-Louise's eyes, puzzled, anxious, on Jean's face, shifted to the little clay figure--and their expression changed instantly.

"But, Jean!" she cried, clasping her hands. "But, Jean, that is not a _poupee_ you have made there. It--it will never do at all! Ninon Lachance would break the arms off at the first minute, and it is too _charmante_ for that. Oh, but, Jean, it--it is _adorable_!"

Jean was inspecting the figure in a curiously abstracted way, as though he had never seen it before, turning his head now to this side, now to that, and turning the clay around and around in his hands to examine it from all angles, while a heightened colour crept into his face and dyed his cheeks. It was a small figure, hardly a foot and a half in height--the figure of a fisherwoman, barefooted, in short skirts, the clothes as though windswept clinging close around her limbs, her arms stretched out as to the sea. He laughed a little unnaturally.

"Well, then, since it will not do for Ninon Lachance, and you like it, Marie-Louise," he said a little self-consciously; "it is for you."

"For me--Jean? Really for me?" she asked happily.

"And why not?" said Jean. "Since it _is_ you."

"Me!"--she looked at him in a prettily bewildered way.

"But, yes," said Jean, holding the figure off at arm's length. "See, it is a beacon--the welcome of the fisherman home from the sea. And are you not that, Marie-Louise, and will you not stand on the shore at evening and hold out your arms for me as I pull home in the boat? Are you not the beacon, Marie-Louise--for me?"

Her hand stole over one of his and pressed it, but it was a moment before she spoke.

"I will pray to the _bon Dieu_ to make me that, Jean--always," she said softly.

He drew her close to him.

"It is the luck of Jean Laparde!" he whispered tenderly.

They sat for a little time in silence--then Jean sprang sharply to his feet.

"_Ma foi_, Marie-Louise!" he called out in sudden consternation, glancing at the sun. "I did not know we had been here so long." He picked up the little clay figure hastily, placed it in the basket, threw his coat, that was on the ground, over it, and, swinging the basket to the crook of his arm, held out his hand to Marie-Louise. "Come, _petite_, we will hurry back."

It was not far across the fields and down the little rise to the road that paralleled the beach; and in some five minutes, walking quickly, they came out upon the road itself by the turn near the rough wooden bridge that crossed the creek halfway between the eastern headland and the white, clustering cottages of Bernay-sur-Mer. But here, for all their hurry, they paused suddenly of one accord, looking at each other questioningly, as voices reached them from the direction of the bridge which, still hidden from their view, was just around the bend of the road ahead.

* * * * *

"But, my dear"--it was a man speaking, his tone a sort of tolerant protest--"I am sure it is just the place we have been looking for. It is quiet here."

"Quiet!"--it was a woman's voice this time, in a wealth of irony. "It is stagnation! There isn't a single thing alive here--even the sea is dead! It is enough to give one the blues for the rest of one's life! And the accommodations at that unspeakable tavern are absolutely appalling. I can't imagine what you are dreaming of to want to stay another minute! I'm quite sure there are lots of other places that will furnish all the rest and quiet required, and where, at the same time, we can at least be comfortable. Anyway, I'm not going to stay here!"

"But, Myrna, you--"

"There is some one coming," said the girl.

* * * * *

Jean and Marie-Louise were walking forward again.

"What are they saying, Jean?" asked Marie-Louise.

Jean shook his head.

"I do not know," he answered. "It is English. See! There they are!"

An elderly, well-dressed man, grey-haired, clean-shaven, a little stout, with a wholesomely good-natured, ruddy face, was leaning against the railing of the bridge; and beside him, digging at the planks with the tip of her parasol, stood a girl in dainty white, her head bent forward, her face hidden under the wide brim of a picture hat.

Jean's eyes, attracted as by a magnet, passed over the man and fixed upon the girl. At Nice, at Monte Carlo, so they said, one saw many such as she; but Bernay-sur-Mer was neither Nice nor Monte Carlo, and he had never seen a woman gowned like that before. _'Cre nom_, what exquisite harmony of line and poise! If she would but look up! _Bon Dieu_, but it would be a desecration of the picture if she were not gloriously pretty!

The gentleman, nodding pleasantly, greeted them as they approached.

"Good afternoon!" he said smilingly, in French.

The girl had raised her head, grey eyes sweeping Marie-Louise with well bred indifference--and Jean was staring at her.

"_Bon jour, m'sieu_!"--he spoke mechanically, lifted his cap mechanically.

His eyes had not left the girl's face. He could not take his eyes from her face. It was a wonderful face, a beautiful face, and something in it thrilled him and bade him feast his eyes upon it to drink in its beauty. And, his head thrown back exposing the bare rugged neck, the broad, sturdy shoulders unconsciously squared a little, the fine, dark eyes wide with admiration and a strange, keen appraisement, the splendid physique, the strength, the power and vigour of young manhood outstanding in face and form, he gazed at her. And her eyes, from Marie-Louise, met his, and from them faded their expression of indifference, and into them came something Jean could not define, only that as the blood rushed suddenly unbidden to his face and he felt it hot upon his cheeks, he saw the colour ebb from hers to a queer whiteness--and then her hat hid her face again--and he had passed by.

It was as though his veins were running fire. He glanced at Marie-Louise. Shyly diffident in the presence of strangers, her head was lowered. She had seen nothing. Seen nothing! Seen what? He did not know. His blood was tingling, his brain was confusion.

He walked on, hurrying unconsciously.

It was Marie-Louise who spoke.

"They are of the _grand monde_," she said in a sort of wondering excitement, when they were out of ear-shot.

"Yes," said Jean absently.

"And English or American."

"Yes," said Jean.

"But the rich people do not come to Bernay-sur-Mer where there is no amusement for them," she submitted with a puzzled air. "I wonder what they are going to do here?"

Jean's eyes were on the road. He did not raise them.

"Who knows!" said Jean Laparde.

-- IV --

STRANGERS WITHIN THE GATES

"Until to-morrow"--the words kept echoing in Jean's ears, as he hurried now on his way back to the Bas Rhone. "Until to-morrow"--Marie-Louise had called to him, as he had left the house on the bluff after taking her home. Well, what was there unusual in that! Though he went often, he did not go to see Marie-Louise every evening, and it was not the first time she had ever said it. Why should he be vaguely conscious of a sort of relief that she had said "until to-morrow" on this particular occasion? It was a very strange way to feel--but then his mind was in the most curiously jumbled state! That meeting at the bridge of less than half an hour ago obsessed him. Where had they come from, these strangers? How long were they going to stay? Or, perhaps--an unaccountable dismay suddenly seized him--perhaps they had already gone! But Papa Fregeau, of course, would know all that--therefore, naturally, he was impatient to reach the Bas Rhone and Papa Fregeau.

The empty basket on his arm, for Marie-Louise had taken the beacon and he had forgotten all about Papa Fregeau's fish, Jean paused as he reached the bridge. It was here that look had passed between them. He would never forget that. It meant nothing--he was not a fool--it could mean nothing. It was only a look, only an instant in which those grey eyes had met his--but he would never forget it!

He hurried on again.

Perhaps he had imagined that expression, that flash, that spark, that something that was impellingly magnetic in those grey eyes. No, he had not imagined it; he had felt it, known it, sensed it. In that one instant something had passed between them that in all his life he would never forget--it had left him like a man adrift on a shoreless sea with the startling wonder of it. She was of the _grand monde_--Marie-Louise had said it. And he was a fisherman. She could have no interest in a fisherman; and what interest could a fisherman--bah, it was pitifully laughable! But it was not laughable! If he could only define that look! It was as if--_bon Dieu_, what was it!--as if she were a woman and he were a man. Yes; it was that! It was only for a moment, by now she would have forgotten it; but for that moment it had been that. Only, whereas she would have forgotten, with him it remained. It was curious--her form was even more like that dream statue than was Marie-Louise's. If by any chance she should already have gone! The thought, recurring, brought once more that twinge of dismay. Was it strange that he should want to see her again! True, she would never look at him like that a second time, she had been off her guard for that little instant when there had been no _grand monde_ and no fisherman, but she was still the same beautiful woman, glorious in form and face--and the allurement of her presence was like some rare, exquisite fragrance stealing upon the senses, enslaving them.

And now, as he approached the little village, and passed the first cottage, with the Bas Rhone in sight beyond, he found himself eagerly searching the beach, the single street for sign of her. But there was no sign. Everything about the village was as it always was every early evening in Bernay-sur-Mer, when it was summer and the light held late. Strewn out along the beach, the men were at work upon their boats and nets; the children played about the doorways; through the open doors one could see the women busy over the evening meal--nothing else! And surely there would have been some stir of excitement if the strangers were still there, at least amongst the children--it was an event, that, to Bernay-sur-Mer. They had gone then, evidently!

Jean's eyes lifted from a fruitless sweep of the beach to fix on the figure of Papa Fregeau emerging on the run from the Bas Rhone.

"The fish, Jean! The fish!" the fat little man called out breathlessly.

"The fish?" repeated Jean--and then, a little sheepishly, stared into the empty basket.

Papa Fregeau, who had reached Jean's side, was staring into it too.

"Yes--the fish! The fish!" he shouted. "Where are the fish you promised to bring back?"

And then Jean laughed.

"Why," said Jean, "I--I think I must have forgotten them."

Papa Fregeau was excited. He began to dance up and down, his fat paunch shaking like jelly.

"Idiot! Imbecile!" he stormed. "Have I not had trouble enough without this! _Sacre bleu de misericorde_! What an afternoon! And you laugh--_bete_, that you are! And now what shall I do?"

"Do?" said Jean---and stopped laughing. "What is the matter?"

"Matter!" spluttered the patron of the Bas Rhone. "Matter! Have I not told you what is the matter? The fish!"

"Yes, but a few fish," said Jean, eyeing the other in a half puzzled way. "What are a few fish that you--"

"You do not understand!"--Papa Fregeau was still dancing up and down as he kept step with Jean, who had now started on again toward the Bas Rhone. "Listen! They are Americans of Paris, they say! They arrive in an automobile this afternoon--mademoiselle and her father, the maid and the chauffeur. It is fine, they stop at the Bas Rhone and engage rooms. Excellent! Nothing could be better. There is profit in that. I carry the trunks, the valises, a multitude of effects that are strapped all over the automobile to the rooms, and am on the point of sending for Mother Fregeau at Marie-Louise's. _Sapristi_--I do not pretend to be a cook! They start out for a walk, the mademoiselle and her father--and the mademoiselle, before they are out of sight from the window, returns to say that they will not stay, that I shall repack everything on that accursed car in readiness for their departure on the return from their walk. _Tourment de Satan_!--very good, I repack it. And now you bring no fish!"

Jean shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, since they are gone, what does it matter?"

"Gone! _Tonnerre_!"--Papa Fregeau's face was apoplectic, and his fat cheeks puffed in and out like toy balloons. "Gone! Have I not told you that they are not gone!"

"You have told me nothing"--there was a sudden, quick interest in Jean's voice. "They are gone--and they are not gone! What are you talking about?"

"I do not know what I am talking about!" snapped Papa Fregeau fiercely. "How should I know! It is first this, then that, then this, then that--it is a _badauderie_! She is crazy, the girl; the father is no better; the maid, Nanette, is a hussy. She slapped my face when I but paid her a pretty compliment; and Jules, the chauffeur, is a pig who lies on his back under the infernal machine and will not lift a finger with the baggage. Wait! Listen! Come here!" He pulled Jean in through the door and across the cafe to the bar at the far end of the room, where he hastily decanted a glass of cognac and tossed it off. "See! Listen!" he went on excitedly, replenishing his glass. "I repack everything on the machine again, which is out there behind the tavern. I climb the stairs and I descend the stairs three dozen times, there is always one more package. And then fifteen minutes ago mademoiselle returns from her walk alone, and waves her hands--_pouf_!--just like that--and she says: 'Monsieur Fregeau, we will stay; take the baggage back to the rooms!' _C'est insupportable, ca_!" Papa Fregeau flung out his arms in abandoned despair. "And now there is no supper for them. _Sapristi_, I am no cook; but I could cook fish if you, _miserable_ that you are, had brought them--heh! And it is too late now to send for Mother Fregeau."

Jean was paying but slender attention. They had not gone! They were going to stay!

"Get Madame Lachance, next door, to help you," he said absently. Then abruptly: "Mademoiselle returned alone, you say--and what of monsieur, her father?"

Papa Fregeau made a gulp at his second glass.

"He is impossible!" he choked. "With him it is the sunset! Who ever heard of such a thing! He is on the beach to gaze at the sunset! _Nom d'un nom_, is it extraordinary that the sun should set! But it is not him, it is mademoiselle. I am sure he knows nothing of all this, and concerns himself less. It is mademoiselle's doing. And I have had enough! I will not any longer be made a fool of!" He banged his pudgy fist on the _comptoir_. "Is it to stand on my head that I am patron of the Bas Rhone! _Sacre bleu_! I will not support it! I tell you that I will not--" Papa Fregeau's mouth remained wide open.

"Monsieur Fregeau!" a voice called softly in excellent French from the rear door. "Nanette is struggling with a valise on the back stairs that is much too heavy for her, and perhaps if you--"

Papa Fregeau's mouth closed, opened again--and, in his haste to make a bow, the cognac glass became a shower of tinkling splinters on the floor.

"But _immediatement_! Instantly, Mademoiselle!" cried Papa Fregeau effusively. "On the moment! A valise that is too heavy for her! It is a sacrilege! It is unpardonable! Instantly, Mademoiselle, on the instant! On the moment!"--and he rushed from the room.

She stood in the doorway; and, from under bewitchingly half closed lids, the grey eyes met Jean's. And under her gaze that was quite calm, unruffled, self-possessed now, the blood rushed tingling again through his veins, and again he felt it mounting to his cheeks. She wore no hat now; and, with the sun's last rays through the doorway falling softly upon her wealth of hair, it was as though it were a wondrously woven mass of glinting bronze that crowned her head.

Jean's cap was in his hand.

"Oh!" she said. "You are the"--there was just a trace of hesitation over the choice of the word--"the man who passed us on the bridge a little while ago, aren't you?"

There was something, a sort of indefinable challenge, in the voice and eyes, a carelessness that, well as it was simulated, was not wholly genuine. Jean's eyes met the grey ones, held them--and suddenly he smiled, accepting the challenge.

"It is good of mademoiselle to recognise me," he answered.

She stared at him for an instant, her eyes opening wide; and then, with a contagious, impulsive laugh, she came forward into the room.

"Of course!" she cried. "You would answer like that! I knew it! You are less like a fisherman, for all your clothes, than any man I ever saw."

"I?" said Jean, in quick surprise. It was strange she had said that! It was only that afternoon that Marie-Louise had said almost the same thing. Not like a fisherman! Why not? What was this imagined difference between himself and the other men in Bernay-sur-Mer?

"Yes; you," she returned briskly. "And now I suppose you will tell me that you were born here, and have lived here all your life?"

"But yes, mademoiselle," he smiled again, and shrugged his shoulders; "since it is so. I have never been anywhere else."

"And since it is so, it must be so," she nodded. "What is your name?"

"Jean Laparde," he replied.

"Jean"--she repeated the word deliberately. "I like Jean," she decided, nodding her head again. "I like Laparde, too, but I will call you Jean."

Jean's eyes met hers a little quizzically. She carried things by assault, this beautiful American girl! There was a certain element of intimacy, an air of proprietorship adopted toward him that somehow, at one and the same time, quickened his pulse at the vague promise that they would not be strangers if only she should stay in Bernay-sur-Mer, and piqued his man-mind at the hint of mastery being snatched from him.

"All call me Jean," he said quietly.

"Then that is settled!" she announced brightly. "Now tell me--Jean. Is there any other place in the village besides this impossible Taverne du Bas Rhone where we could stay for a week--a month--as long as we liked?"

"A week--a month!"--Jean leaned suddenly toward her, an incredulous delight unconsciously spontaneous in his voice. "You are going to stay that long? But Papa Fregeau said you had no sooner arrived than you decided to go again, and--"

"Your Papa Fregeau has a tongue that runs away with him," she interrupted quickly. "One may change one's mind, I suppose? This place will do for to-night; but afterwards--surely there is some other place where we could stay?"

Jean shook his head.

"There is only the Bas Rhone," he said slowly. "I--I am afraid--"

"And now, after all, you are going to be stupid!" she exclaimed reproachfully.

What was it? What did she mean? It was not the words--they were nothing. It was the tone, her eyes, an appeal in the exquisite grace of the lithe form bending toward him, the touch of the fingers laid lightly on his sleeve, that look again that levelled all barriers between them--until she was a woman and he was a man. His mind was in riot. He was a fool! And yet, fool or no, the thought would come. Why did she want to stay now? Papa Fregeau had said that almost on their arrival they had decided to go on. It was during her walk that she had changed her mind. What had happened on that walk to make her change her mind? A walk in Bernay-sur-Mer was not full of incident! It was ridiculous, absurd, fantastical, but it was there, the thought, sweeping him with a surge of wild emotion--was it that meeting on the bridge? But why? How? He was a rough-garbed fisherman, and she--

She laughed delightedly.

"What a frown! How fierce you are! Is it then such a terrible affair to help me a little--Jean?"

"_Mon Dieu_!" cried Jean--and the words were on his lips with a rush. "But--_no_!"

"Oh!" she murmured, and drew back a little; and the colour, rising, glowed pink through her cheeks. "You _are_ impulsive, aren't you? Well, then, since you are to help me, what are we to do?"

Jean's eyes were revelling in that pink flush. It was satisfying to the man-mind, that--even though she were of the _grand monde_ then, a woman was a woman after all. It was a sort of turning of the tables, that added to the magnetism of her presence because it put him suddenly more at his ease. But to help her--that was another matter. Bernay-sur-Mer was--Bernay-sur-Mer! _Voila tout_! Apart from the Bas Rhone there was no accommodation for strangers, for there was nothing stranger than strangers in Bernay-sur-Mer. Since then there was no other place for them to go, he could think of no other place. And yet, a week, a month--to think that she would spend that time in Bernay-sur-Mer! _Ciel_! Where were his brains?

"Well?" she prompted, with alluring imperiousness.

It was the force of habit. In trouble, in perplexity, in joy, in sorrow, for counsel, for advice there was but one court of appeal in Bernay-sur-Mer--the good Father Anton. The role of Father Anton was not only spiritual--it was secular. Bernay-sur-Mer was a child and Father Anton was its parent--it had always been so.

"I will ask Father Anton," said Jean.

"Father Anton? Who is Father Anton?" she demanded.

"He is the cure," Jean answered. "I do not know of any place, but Father Anton will know if there is any, and--"

"Splendid!" she broke in excitedly. "Let us go and ask Father Anton at once. Come along"--she crossed the cafe to the front door. "Come along, Jean, and show me the way."

Yes, certainly, she carried things by assault this American girl. She bubbled with life and vivacity. And he was to walk with her now to Father Anton's--half an hour ago he would as soon have dreamed of possessing a fortune! It was incredible! It must be a marvellous world that, where she came from--but no, even the women of her world could not be like her! The suppleness of her form, it was divine; the carriage, the poise, the smile--it was intoxication, it went to the senses!

"I am mad! It is as though--as though I were drunk with wine!" Jean muttered--and followed her across the room.

"Now where is this Father Anton of yours?"--as Jean joined her outside the tavern.

"There," said Jean, and pointed along the street. "Do you see the church--behind the second cottage? Well, it is there--just on the other side."

She nodded--and Jean, glancing at her, found that she was not looking in that direction at all. Instead, she seemed wholly engaged in watching a boat start shoreward, as it pulled away from the side of a smack anchored out in the bay. Father Anton might have been the last thing that concerned her. Jean's eyes, a little puzzled, followed hers. When he looked up again, the grey eyes were laughing at him.

"Is it quite safe out there?" she asked, waving her hand.

"Safe?" repeated Jean, in a bewildered way.

"Stupid!" she cried merrily. "Yes, of course--safe! If I am to stay here, I cannot lie all day upon the beach and do nothing. You have a boat, haven't you, Jean?"

"But, yes," said Jean.

"Then I am quite sure it will be safe," she decided. "I must have a boat, and, of course, a boatman. You will be the boatman, Jean. Oh, I really believe that, after all, Bernay-sur-Mer will be possible. There will be places where we can go, little excursions, and heaps of things like that. There, that is settled! And now I am more eager than ever to see Father Anton."

Yes; it was settled! It was phrase of hers, that! To have demurred would have been as impossible as to have said no. And, besides, he had no wish to either demur or refuse. It seemed as though he were hurried forward captive into some strange, unknown land of enchantment. It staggered him, bewildered him, lured him, fired his imagination--and there was no desire to rouse himself from what seemed like a wonderful dream. No woman that he had ever seen, or imagined was like her. To spend a day where he could feast his eyes upon her!--and did she not now talk of many days! Even a fisherman might lift his eyes as high as that--since she gave him leave. Afterwards, she would go away again; but, _bon Dieu_, one could at least live in the present! It would be something to remember! Her eyes were on him again. He felt them studying him. Her hand brushed his arm. There was a faint, enticing fragrance of violets in the air about her.

"You are not very gallant, Jean!" she laughed out. "Aren't you pleased with the suggestion; or would you rather--fish?"

They had reached the church, and turned.

"I was thinking," said Jean, with unconscious naivete, "that I was afraid Father Anton would not know of any place."

She looked at him quickly, a flash in the grey eyes--then the lids lowered. The next instant she was pointing ahead of her.

"But there!" she cried out. "There is Monsieur le Cure's house, is it not?" She clapped her hands in sudden delight. "Why, it is a play-house, only a make-believe one! And how pretty!"

Behind the church was a little garden, full-flowered; a little white fence; a little white gate; and, at the end of the garden, a little cottage, smaller than any, where none were large, in Bernay-sur-Mer, and which was white in colour, too, if one might hazard a guess for the vines that grew over it, covering it, submerging it, clothing it in a clinging mass of green, until only the little stubby chimney peeked shyly out from the centre of the slanting roof.

"Yes," said Jean; "and there is Father Anton himself."

A bare-headed, silver-haired form in rusty black _soutane_, a watering pot in hand, was bending over a bed of dahlias; but at the sound of their approach the priest put down the watering pot, and came hurriedly toward them to the gate.

"Ah, Jean, my son!" he cried out heartily--and bowed with old-fashioned courtliness to Jean's companion. "I heard there were strangers in Bernay-sur-Mer, mademoiselle; but that they had gone on again. You are very welcome. Won't you come in?"

She leaned upon the gate, smiling--and shook her head.

"No, thank you, Monsieur le Cure. I must not stay long, or my father will be wondering what could have become of me. The truth is, that I--we are in trouble, and Jean here has brought me to you."

"Trouble!" exclaimed Father Anton anxiously, and his face grew suddenly grave.

She shook her head again, and laughed.

"Oh, it is not serious! You see--but I must introduce myself. I am Myrna Bliss. My father is Henry Bliss--I wonder if you have ever heard of him? We have lived for years and years in Paris."

Father Anton was genuinely embarrassed.

"I--I am afraid I never have," he admitted.

"Oh, well," she cried gaily, "you mustn't feel badly about it. His is entirely a reflected glory--that is what I tell him. Art! Everything is art with him, painting, sculpture, literature; and, as he can do neither one nor the other himself, he endows a school for this, or a _societe_ for that, and money exists for only one reason--the advancement of art. And since he calls Paris the home of art, we live in Paris. But now I am prattling like a school girl"--she laughed infectiously.

The cure's old face wrinkled into smiles.

"It is very interesting, mademoiselle," he said. "And here in Bernay-sur-Mer I fear we know too little of such things." He reached across the fence and laid his hand affectionately on Jean's shoulder. "But it is not quite all our fault, is it, Jean? The _sous_ come hard with the fishing, and we do not have much time for anything outside our own little world. I should greatly like to talk with monsieur, your father. Is it possible that you are to stay a little while here?"

"If we do"--the girl's face was a picture of roguish merriment--"you will not be able to escape him, I promise you, Monsieur le Cure--so beware! But that is our trouble. My father is on what he calls a little holiday--it is really that he needs rest and quiet. For a man of his age, what with his own affairs and his 'art,' he is far too active. Very well. Bernay-sur-Mer is ideal, only--except--Monsieur le Cure, I am sure, will understand--except the Bas Rhone."

"Ah, the Bas Rhone!" said Father Anton. "It is that, then--the Bas Rhone?"

"Exactly!" she smiled. "And so Jean has brought me to you to suggest something else for us."

Father Anton joined his finger tips thoughtfully.

"Yes; I see," he said. "My good friends, the Fregeaus, would do all in their power for you, they are most excellent people; but, yes--h'm--I see. It is a cafe much more than an inn, and for a cafe it answers very well; and, after all, it is not their fault that there are not proper accommodations for guests. Yes; I am afraid the accommodations must be very inadequate. But you see, mademoiselle"--Father Anton's voice had a quaint, gentle note of pleading--"we are quite off the main road, and it is rare that a stranger stops in Bernay-sur-Mer, and since they are poor they could not afford, even if they had the money, to make an investment that would bring no return. But something else--h'm! Truly, mademoiselle, I do not know--there is certainly no other place to board."

"Well, a little furnished cottage then," she suggested. "I have my own maid, and, if there were some one else to help a little, nothing would suit us better. Now, Monsieur le Cure, you are not going to be so heartless as to tell me there are no cottages either!"

For a moment Father Anton did not answer--then his face broke suddenly into smiles.

"But, no, mademoiselle," he declared quickly, nodding his head delightedly at Jean, "I shall tell you nothing of the sort. One might say it was almost providential. Nothing could be better! And the finest cottage in Bernay-sur-Mer, too! Mademoiselle and her father will be charmed with it--and all day I have been worrying about what to do with Marie-Louise. Would it not be just the thing, Jean?"

"_Ma foi_!" gasped Jean in surprise, staring from one to the other. "The house on the bluff?"

"And what else?" said Father Anton enthusiastically. "Listen, mademoiselle; I will explain to you. It is the house out there on the headland, where Gaston Bernier lived with his niece, Marie-Louise. Three days ago in the great storm _le pauvre_ Gaston was hurt, and that night he died. Marie-Louise can no longer live there alone--it is not right for a young girl. I thought to bring her here to live with me and my old housekeeper; but now she can rent the house to you, and can help with the work for she is a very good cook."

"Father Anton, you are a treasure!" cried Myrna Bliss vivaciously. "We will take the house. And the rent? Would, say, two hundred francs a month be right?"

"Two hundred francs?" repeated Father Anton incredulously, his eyes widening.

"Yes; and another hundred for Marie-Louise."

Three hundred francs! It was not a large sum of money--it was a fortune! Father Anton, in his years of ministry at Bernay-sur-Mer, could not remember ever having seen a sum like that all at one time; also, it was out of all proportion to what he would have thought Marie-Louise should demand. The good cure's face was a picture with its mingled emotions--he was torn between a desire that this good fortune should come to Marie-Louise, and a fear in his honest heart that he should be privy to the crime of extortion!

Myrna Bliss laughed at him merrily.

"Then that is settled!" she announced. "Three hundred francs. There is nothing more to be said. The only question is, will Marie-Louise let us have the house?"

"Mademoiselle," said the old priest, his eyes twinkling, "may I say it?--you are charming! As for the arrangements, have no fear. I would go this evening, only I have some sick to visit. But very early in the morning I will see Marie-Louise, and by the time mademoiselle and her father have had breakfast the house will be at their disposal."

She reached her hand across the gate to thank Father Anton and bid the cure good evening--but Jean no longer heard a word. His mind seemed to be clashing discordantly; his thoughts in dissension, in open hostility one to another. She was to live in the house on the bluff. Marie-Louise was to stay there, too. One moment he saw no objection to the plan; the next moment, for a thousand vague, fragmentary reasons, that in their entire thousand would not form a single concrete whole that he could grasp, he did not like it at all.

He answered Father Anton's "_au revoir_" mechanically, as they started back for the Bas Rhone. She was in a hurry now, all life, all excitement--half running.

"Did I not tell you, Jean, that I would find just what I wanted?" she called out in gay spirits.

She had told him nothing of the sort.

"Yes," said Jean.

They reached the Bas Rhone, and there, in the doorway, she turned.

"I must find my father, and tell him," she said. There was a smile, a flash of the grey eyes, a glint from the bronze-crowned head, a quick little impetuous pressure on his arm, a laugh soft and musical as the rippling of a brook; and then: "Until to-morrow, Jean."

And she was gone.

Until to-morrow! The words were strangely familiar. Papa Fregeau was hurrying through the cafe. Jean turned away. He had no wish to talk to Papa Fregeau--or any one else. He walked down to the beach--and his eyes, across the bay, fixed on the headland. Yes, that was it! Until to-morrow--that was what Marie-Louise had said--until to-morrow.

He went on along the beach, his brain feverishly chaotic. She had been like a vision, a glorious vision, suddenly gone, as she had stood there in the doorway. Her name was Myrna Bliss. Why not, since Father Anton could not go that night, why not go to Marie-Louise himself and tell her about the house? Yes; he would do that.

He crossed the beach to the road again, and started on--walking rapidly. As he neared the little bridge, his pace slowed. At the bridge he halted. Perhaps it would be better not to go--it would be better left to Father Anton, that!

"_Sacre bleu_!" cried Jean suddenly aloud. "What is the matter with me? What has happened?"

But he went no further along the road; for, after a moment, he turned, retracing his steps slowly toward Bernay-sur-Mer.

And so that night Jean did not go to Marie-Louise. But there, at the house on the bluff, later on, Marie-Louise, after Mother Fregeau had gone to bed, took the beacon that Jean had made and placed it upon the table in the front room where, before, that other beacon, the great lamp, had stood. And for a long time she sat before it, her elbows on the table, now looking at the little clay figure, now staring through the window to the headland's point where sometimes she could see the surf splash silver white in the moonlight. It had been a happy afternoon in many ways; but there was something that would not let it be all happiness, for there was confusion in her thoughts. The house was lonely now, and Uncle Gaston had gone; it did not seem true, it did not seem that it could be he would not open that door again and come thumping in with the nets over his shoulders and the wooden floats bumping on the floor--and the tears unbidden filled her eyes. And her talk with Jean somehow had not satisfied her, had not dispelled that intuition that troubled her, for all that he had laughed at her for it; and they had not, after all, settled what she was to do now that Uncle Gaston was gone, for, instead of talking more about it, Jean had forgotten all about her for ever so long while he had worked at the little clay figure.

Her eyes, from the window, fastened on the beacon with its open, outstretched arms--and, suddenly, confusion went and great tenderness came. He had made it for her, and he had said that--that it _was_ her.

"Jean's beacon," she said softly.

And presently she went upstairs to the little attic room, and undressed, and blew out the candle; and, in her white night-robe, the black hair streaming over her shoulders, the moonlight upon her, she knelt beside the bed.

"Make me that, _mon Pere_," she whispered; "make me that--Jean's beacon all through my life."

-- V --

"WHO IS JEAN LAPARDE?"

The mattress was of straw--and the straw had probably been garnered in a previous generation, if not in a prehistoric age! It was so old that it was a shifting, lumpy mass of brittle chaff, whose individual units at unexpected moments punctured the ticking and, nettle-wise, stuck through the coarse sheet. It was not comfortable. It had not been comfortable all night. Truly, the best that could be said for the Bas Rhone was that, as Father Anton in his gentle way had taken pains to make it clear, its proprietors were well-intentioned--and that was a source of comfort only as far as it went!

Myrna Bliss wriggled drowsily into another position--and a moment later wriggled back into the old one. Then she opened her eyes, and stared about her. The morning sun was streaming in through the window. She observed this with sleepy amazement. After all then, she must have slept more than she had imagined, in spite of the awful bed.

The _lap-lap-lap_ of the sea came to her. In through the open window floated the voices of children at play in the street; from down on the beach the sound of men's voices, shouting and calling cheerily to each other, reached her; from below stairs some sort of a family reunion appeared to be in progress. She could hear that absurd Papa Fregeau talking as though he were a soda-water bottle with the cork suddenly exploded!

"Ah, _mignonne--cherie_! You are back! You will go away no more--not for a day! I have been in despair! It is the Americans! I have been miserable! _Tiens, embrasse-moi_, my little Lucille!"

There was the commotion of a playful struggle, then the resounding smack of a kiss--and then a woman's voice.

"Such a simpleton as you are, _mon_ Jacques!"--it was as though one were talking to a child. "So they have put you in despair, these Americans! Well, then, I am back. And listen!"--importantly. "What do you think?"

"Think?" cried Papa Fregeau excitedly. "But I do not think!"

"That is true," was the response; "so I will tell you. They are going away this morning."

"_Merci_!" exclaimed Papa Fregeau fervently. "I am very glad!"

"They are going to Marie-Louise's."

"To Marie-Louise's!"--incredulously. "You tell me that they are going to Marie-Louise's?"

"Yes; to Marie-Louise's, stupid! Father Anton came an hour ago to make the arrangements. They are to rent the house, and Marie-Louise is to remain there _en domestique_. Now what have you to say to that?"

"_Mon Dieu_!" ejaculated Papa Fregeau, with intense earnestness. "That I am sorry for Marie-Louise!"

Myrna Bliss laughed softly, delightedly to herself--and then, with a sudden little gasp, sat bolt upright in bed. The whole thing, everything since yesterday afternoon had been inconceivably preposterous--and she herself preposterous most of all! If her father ever heard the truth of it, what a scene there would be!

She got out of bed impulsively, walked to the window, and leaned her elbows on the sill, her brows gathered in a perplexed little frown. Just what had happened anyway? She had decided ten minutes after they had arrived in Bernay-sur-Mer that she would die of ennui if she stayed there. They had started for a walk, she and her father, and, without saying anything to him, she had turned back and taken it upon herself to inform this fat, effervescent little hotel proprietor that they would go on that afternoon. She had intended, during the walk, to tell her father what she had done, and, in fact, had told him; and then on her return after that--yes, that meeting on the bridge--she had countermanded her orders, and not only countermanded them but had even rented a cottage! Her father had seen nothing extraordinary in it, which was natural enough--since he left all travelling arrangements to her. Indeed, on the contrary, as Bernay-sur-Mer had seemed to appeal to him, he had been rather taken with the idea--if perhaps a trifle sceptical as to the success of the housekeeping plan. In a word, if the discovery of what she believed to be suitable accommodations had induced her to change her mind and stay in Bernay-sur-Mer, it was perfectly satisfactory to him. The brows smoothed out. As far as her father was concerned, that was all there was to it. She had been the practical manager ever since her mother had died five years before.

The brows puckered up again. Her father would never give it a second thought, he would never for an instant imagine there was any ulterior motive for what she had done. How could he--when the real reason was so utterly absurd, ridiculous and unheard of! Fancy! What would that select and ultra-exclusive set in Paris say? What if it ever came to the ears of New York! Myrna Bliss to bury herself alive in a little Mediterranean village that was probably not even on the map, and all at a glance from the eyes of a--fisherman! They wouldn't believe it. Who would believe it! It was unimaginable!

Dainty little fingers reached up and drummed with their pink tips on the window pane; the pucker became more pronounced. Well, she _had_ done it, nevertheless. And why was it so absurd, so ridiculous, so impossible after all? She would do exactly the same thing over again without an instant's hesitation. It was quite true the man was a fisherman--but he did not _look_ like a fisherman. He was magnificent! It was not ridiculous at all--it was piquantly delightful. Neither was it so absurdly impossible--if she did not stay in Bernay-sur-Mer, it would only be to choose some other place equally as tiresome--and without even a "fisherman" to compensate for it. What a face the man had! It was not merely handsome, it was--well, it was the prototype of what the artist coterie that buzzed around her father day and night was forever attempting to give expression to, but which, until now, she had never believed could exist in real life. He would be a refreshing change this astounding man-creature, this Jean Laparde, after the vapid attentions of the vapid men who made up her life in the social whirl of Paris--Count von Heirlich and Lord Barnvegh, for examples, out of a host of satellites who were constantly at her heels, because, of course, she was an heiress; and whose attentions she endured because, of course, some day she must marry, and because, of course again, to marry anything less than a title, a name, fame, was quite out of the question. As for that, no one expected anything but a brilliant match for her--and certainly she expected nothing less for herself. What a pity that they were not like Jean Laparde, those men of her world!

The fingers, from the window pane, tossed back a truant coil of hair; the white shoulders lifted in a little shrug. Paris--New York! That was all the world she knew. New York once a year--Paris the rest of the time. Expatriates--for art! That's what they were! Art--her father was obsessed with it. It was a mania with him; it was the last thing in the world that interested her. As a matter of fact, she couldn't seem to think of anything that particularly interested her. One tired quickly enough of the social merry-go-round--after a season it became inane. One surely had the right to amuse one's self with a new sensation--if one could find it! The man had the physique of a young god. A fisherman--well, what of it? He was splendid. He was more than splendid. Even the crude dress seemed to enhance him. It was a face that had made her catch her breath in that long second when their eyes had met. Yes, of course--why not admit it?--he interested her. He was rugged, he was strong, and above all he was supremely a man. Of course, it was only a matter of a week, a month, the time they chose to stay there; but it would be a decided novelty while it lasted.

She laughed suddenly aloud--a low, rippling little laugh. Actually the man was already her slave! Imagine a man like that her slave! Certainly it would be a new sensation. What a strange thrill it had given her when she had first caught sight of him on the bridge the afternoon before. Well, why shouldn't it have done so--a fisherman with a face like that? It was amazing! Think of finding such a man in such a situation! Was it any wonder that she had thrilled--even if he were only a fisherman? In Paris, of course, she could not have done what she had done, it would have been quite out of the question, there were the conventions--but then in Paris one didn't see men like that!

"And since," confided Myrna Bliss to a little urchin running in the street below, who neither saw nor heard her, "we are not in Paris, but in Bernay-sur-Mer, which is quite another story, you see it is not absurd or ridiculous at all, and I and my fisherman--"

She turned abruptly from the window at the sound of a knock and the opening of her door. It was Nanette, her maid, with a tray.

"I have mademoiselle's _dejeuner_," announced Nanette. "Monsieur Bliss has already finished his, and asks if mademoiselle will soon be ready. He is waiting with Monsieur le Cure for you."

"Waiting--with Monsieur le Cure?"--Myrna's eyebrows went up in well-simulated surprise.

"To visit the cottage mademoiselle has taken," amplified Nanette, and her retrousse nose was delicately elevated a trifle higher. Nanette, very evidently, was one at all events who was not in favour of the plan.

"Oh, the cottage--of course!" exclaimed Myrna, as though suddenly inspired. "I had forgotten all about it. Dress me quickly then, Nanette."

Nanette tossed a shapely dark head.

"Is mademoiselle going to stay here long?"--Nanette at times felt privileged to take liberties.

"Gracious, Nanette!" complained Myrna sweetly. "What a question! How can you possibly expect me to know?"

Nanette arranged the tray perfunctorily.

"There was a man who left a message with that imbecile proprietor for mademoiselle early this morning," she observed. "Mademoiselle has engaged a boatman?"

"A boatman? Certainly not!" declared Myrna Bliss. "Not without seeing the boat--and I have seen no boat!"

"But mademoiselle engages a cottage without seeing the cottage," murmured Nanette slyly.

"That will do, Nanette!" said Myrna severely. "There was but one cottage; there are dozens of boats. It is quite a different matter. What did the man say?"

"That he was obliged to go out for the four o'clock fishing this morning," said Nanette, pouting a little at the rebuke; "but that he would go to mademoiselle at the cottage early in the forenoon."

A row of little white teeth crunched into a piece of crisp toast.

"Very well, Nanette." Myrna's brows pursed up thoughtfully. "You may get out that new marquisette from Fallard's; and, I think"--she glanced out of the window--"my sunbonnet. And, Nanette"--suddenly impatient--"hurry, please--since father is waiting."

Myrna's impatience bore fruit. In ten minutes she was ready, and, running down the stairs, went out to the street, where her father and the cure, deep in conversation--on art undoubtedly, since her father was doing most of the talking!--were pacing slowly up and down, as they waited for her.

Her sunbonnet was swinging in her hand, the big grey eyes were shining, the glow of superb health was in her cheeks.

"Good morning, Father Anton!" she called out gaily. "What a shame to have kept you waiting!"

The old priest turned toward her with unaffected pleasure, as he held out his hand.

"Good morning to you, mademoiselle"--he was smiling with eyes as well as lips. "What a radiant little girl! It makes one full of life and young again; you are, let me see, you are--a tonic!"

She laughed as she turned to her father.

"'Morning, Dad! Sleep well?"

Henry Bliss removed his cigar to survey his daughter with whimsical reproach; then he patted her cheek affectionately.

"Fierce, wasn't it?" he chuckled. "Those beds are the worst ever! I was telling the cure here about them."

"It is too bad," said Father Anton solicitously. "It is regrettable. I am so very sorry. But"--earnestly--"you must not think too hardly of the Fregeaus. Since no guests sleep here, I am sure they can have no idea that--"

"No; of course not!" agreed Henry Bliss heartily, and laughed. "The hard feelings are all in the beds--and we'll let them stay there. Now, then, Myrna, are you ready to inspect this new domain of yours? And shall we walk, or take the car? Father Anton says it is not far."

"We will walk then," decided Myrna.

It was the walk she had taken yesterday, at least it was the same as far as the little bridge; and for that distance she walked beside her father and the cure, chatting merrily, but there she loitered a little behind them. Half impishly, half with a genuine impulse that she rather welcomed than avoided, she told herself that it was quite unfair to pass the little spot so indifferently. Was it not here that this most bizarre of adventures had begun? She had stood here by the railing, and he had stood there across on the other side, and--the red leaped suddenly flaming into her cheeks. She had never looked at a man like that before--no man had ever looked at her like that before! And it had been spontaneous, instant, like a flash of fire that had lighted up a dark and unknown pathway, which, in the momentary blaze of light, was full of strange wonder; and which, because it was an unknown way, and because the glimpse had shown so much in so brief an instant that the brain fused all into confusion and nothing was concrete, resulted, not in illuminating the way, but, the flash of light gone again, in transforming the pathway only into a bewildering maze.

She laughed a little after a while, shaking her head. Such an absurd fancy! But what an entrancing, alluring little fancy! Decidedly, it would be a new sensation to be lost in a maze like that--for a time. She would tire of it soon enough--the thrill probably would not even last as long as she would want it to. No thrill ever did! She bit her lip suddenly in pretty vexation. It was stupid of the man to go off fishing! Had he done it to pique her? The idea! He certainly could not have the temerity to imagine that it lay within his power to pique her. The sunbonnet swung to and fro abstractedly from its ribbon strings. Wasn't it strange that he had--piqued her!

She went on after her father and the cure. They were quite a way ahead now, and she hastened to catch up with them. As she drew near, she caught her father's words.

"... Peyre on the _Histoire Generale des Beaux-Arts_, Monsieur le Cure, I recommend it to you heartily. It is a most comprehensive little volume, embracing in a condensed form the story of the arts from the time of the Egyptians down to the present day, and--"

Myrna, in spite of herself, laughed outright, at which both men turned their heads. Her father, incorrigible, was at it again; and, once started, there was no stopping him. Poor Father Anton! For the rest of the way he would listen to art!

"Did I not tell you to beware, Father Anton?" she cried out in comical despair--and waved them to go on again.

She had no desire to listen to art, its relation to nature, its relation to science, its relation to civilisation, nor, above all, to a dissertation on the modern school. She had heard it all before; and, if it had not passed as quickly through one ear as it had come into the other, her head, she was quite sure, would have driven her to distraction. Besides, it was much more important to think about something else--no, not what she had been thinking about a moment ago; but, for instance, to be practical, about this menage whose wheels, without knowing whether they were oiled or not, she had impulsively set in motion. Would the cottage be at all habitable? Would this Marie-Louise be at all suitable? Would Marie-Louise and Nanette get along together? Nanette was insanely jealous of Jules--nothing but the fact that Jules was with them would have induced Nanette, to whom Paris was the beginning and the end of all things, to have come on such a trip. Yes, there was a very great deal to think about--now that it occurred to her! Myrna fell into a brown study, quite oblivious to her surroundings.

When she joined her father and the cure again, they had stopped at the edge of the little wood on the headland, and a cottage, almost as prettily vine-covered as Father Anton's, lay before them.

"Well, Myrna," her father called, with a smile, "I must say your plunge in the dark looks propitious so far."

"No, no! Not a plunge in the dark!" protested Father Anton quickly, his eyes full of expectant pleasure on Myrna. "That is not fair, Monsieur Bliss! It was on my recommendation, was it not, mademoiselle? And now--eh?--what does mademoiselle think of it?"

It was like the imaginative conception of some painter. The cottage, green with climbing vines, spotlessly white where the vines were sparse, nestled in the trees--in front, as far as the eye could reach, the glorious, deep, unfathomable blue of the Mediterranean; nearer, the splash of surf, like myriad fountains, on the headland's rugged point; while a tiny fringe of beach, just peeping from under the edge of the cliff at the far side of the cottage, glistened as though full of diamonds in the sunlight.

"Father Anton--you are a dear!" Myrna cried impetuously.

Her eyes roved delightedly here and there. There was a little trellis with flowers over the back door--that little outhouse would do splendidly as a garage. And then the front door opened, and her eyes fixed on a girl's figure on the threshold--and somehow the figure was familiar.

"Who is that, Father Anton?" she demanded.

"But it is Marie-Louise--who else?" smiled the priest. "I will call her."

"No," said Myrna; "we will go in."

Of course! How absurd! She recognised the girl now. It was the girl who had passed them on the bridge--Myrna's sunbonnet swung a little abstractedly again--with Jean Laparde.

Father Anton bustled forward.

"Marie-Louise," he said, as they reached the door, "this is the lady and gentleman who are to take the house, and--"

"Oh, but I think we have seen each other before," interposed Myrna graciously. "Was it not you, Marie-Louise, who passed us on the bridge yesterday afternoon?"

Marie-Louise's dark eyes, deep, fearless, met the grey ones--and dropped modestly.

"Yes, mademoiselle," she said.

"Certainly!" said Henry Bliss pleasantly. "I remember you too, and--ah!" With a sudden step, quite forgetting the amenities due his daughter, he brushed by her into the room, and stooped over the clay figure of the beacon. He picked it up, looked at it in a sort of startled incredulity, as though he could not believe his eyes; then, setting it down, went to the window, threw up the shade for better light, and returned to the clay figure. And then, after a moment, he began to mutter excitedly. "Yes--undoubtedly--of the flower of the French school--Demaurais, Lestrange, Pitot--eh?--which? And--yes--here--within a day or so--it is quite fresh!" He rushed back to the doorway to Father Anton. "Who has been in the village recently?"--his words were coming with a rush, he had the priest by the shoulders and was unconsciously shaking him. "Was it a man with long black hair over his coat collar and a beak nose? Was it a little short man who always jerks his head as he talks? Or was it a big fellow, very fat, and, yes, if it were Pitot he would probably be drunk? Quick! Which one was it?"

Father Anton, jaw dropped, dumb with amazement, could only shake his head. This American! Had he gone suddenly mad?

"Good heavens, dad, what is the matter?" Myrna cried out.

He paid no attention to her.

"You, then!"--he whirled on Marie-Louise, grasping her arm fiercely. "Who has been here?"

"But--but, m'sieu," stammered Marie-Louise, shrinking back in affright, "no one has been here."

Myrna pressed forward into the room.

"Dad, what _is_ the--" She got no further.

"It is true--I am a fool. I was wrong. Look, Myrna!"--his face flushed, his eyes lighted with the fire of an enthusiast, he was at the table, lifting up the little clay figure of the fisherwoman with the outstretched arms, the beacon, in his hands again. "Look, Myrna! No, I am not mad--I am only a fool. I, who pride myself as a critic, was fool enough for a moment to think this the work of perhaps Demaurais, or Lestrange, or Pitot--when no one of the three even in his greatest moment of inspiration could approach it! There is life in it. You feel the very soul. It is sublime! But it is more than that--it is a stupendous thing, for, since it has been freshly done, and no stranger to these people has been here, the man who did it must be one of themselves. Don't you understand, Myrna, don't you understand? The world will ring with it. It is the discovery of a genius. I make the statement without reservation. _This is the work of the greatest sculptor France will have ever known_!"

Father Anton had come forward a little timorously, lacing and unlacing his fingers. Upon Myrna's face was a sort of bewildered stupefaction. Marie-Louise, her breath coming in little gasps, was gazing wide-eyed at the man who held in his hands her beacon, the clay figure she had seen Jean make.

"Is--is it true--what you say?" she whispered.

Henry Bliss looked at her for a moment, startled--as though he was for the first time aware of her presence.

"You--yes, of course, you must know about this, as it is in the house here," he burst out abruptly. "You know who made it?"

"But, yes," said Marie-Louise, and now there was a sudden new note, a trembling note of pride that struggled for expression in her voice. "But, yes--it was Jean Laparde."

"Laparde--Jean Laparde?"--his voice was hoarse in its eagerness. "Quick!" he cried. "Laparde--Jean Laparde? Who is Jean Laparde?"

A flush crept pink into Marie-Louise's face.

"He is my fiance," she said.

-- VI --

THE GIFT

Father Anton, with a smile, his eyes twinkling, looked from one to the other of the group as much as to say: "There! Is that not an altogether charming denouement?" Myrna had yet to discover herself in a situation to whose command she did not rise--inwardly a sudden confusion upon her, her face expressed a polite interest. As for Henry Bliss, the words were without any significance whatever--it was not what he wanted to know.

It was Marie-Louise, embarrassed, who broke the silence.

"Will mademoiselle and monsieur look through the house now, and tell me what rooms they will occupy?"

Henry Bliss, for answer, caught Father Anton again by the shoulder.

"This Jean Laparde," he flung out excitedly, "you ought to know all about him! He must have done other things besides this"--he swept his hand toward the beacon, which he had now very carefully replaced on the table.

"But, of course!" declared Father Anton, still smiling. "Mother Fregeau will assure you--forever little faces and figures out of her dough and the inside of her loaves."

"No, no--good Lord!" exclaimed Henry Bliss. "I mean--"

"I am telling you," interrupted Father Anton mildly. "He has been forever at that since he was a boy, and then there are the clay dolls for the children, of which there would be very many, at least a hundred."

"A hundred! A hundred clay _dolls_ by the man who did this!" shouted Henry Bliss eagerly. "And do you mean to say you never realised--oh, good Lord! Where are they?"

Father Anton's eyebrows went up in almost pitying astonishment.

"But, monsieur," he said patiently, "where would they be? They do not last long; and, even if the children did not break them almost immediately, they would soon crumble to pieces like their own mud pies."

"Mud!" Henry Bliss bent quickly over the beacon again. "Yes, so it is! It is mostly mud. It is unbelievable! The man did not even have modelling clay to work with!" He swung again on the cure. "Well, where is this Jean Laparde? I want to see him at once!"

Myrna's laugh rippled suddenly through the room.

"Dad--don't get so excited. Your Jean Laparde won't run away. He's out fishing now, but he said he would come out here this morning."

"Out fishing--come out here this morning?" repeated her father, staring at her. "How do you know?"

Myrna shook her finger at him in playful severity.

"If you had paid any more than the merest pretence of attention to me last night, you would have remembered the name--no"--she laughed again--"no, perhaps after all I didn't mention it, I'm not sure I hadn't forgotten it myself; but he is the fisherman who took me to Father Anton here, you know--the one I told you might possibly do as a boatman for us while we were here."

"Great grief! Do as a--_boatman_!" ejaculated Henry Bliss weakly. "You, Monsieur le Cure, what time do these fishermen return?"

"But anytime, now," Father Anton answered. "The boats go out very early in the morning."

"Good!" Henry Bliss pushed the cure impetuously toward the door. "Then, you and I, Father Anton, will go right back to the village and be there when he comes in."

"But"--Father Anton was quite bewildered--one was literally carried off one's feet--were they all alike, these Americans! "But," he protested helplessly, as he was being pulled through the door, "but if the boats are already in, and since mademoiselle said he was coming here, then--"

"Then we will meet him on the road"--they were already out of the house. "Now, then, Monsieur le Cure, if you are a loyal Frenchman, step out quickly, for this is the greatest day in the history of France, the greatest day, I tell you, in the"--the voice died away in the distance.

Marie-Louise had not moved. She was still standing in the centre of the room, a strangely spellbound, dumfounded little figure.

"Mademoiselle," she ventured timidly, "what--what is--"

"I am sure I do not know," said Myrna languidly. "Have you no shoes or stockings?"

Marie-Louise glanced perplexedly at her small, bare feet.

"But, yes, mademoiselle--for the village sometimes, and when one walks in the fields."

"Go and put them on, then," directed Myrna. "And remember always to wear them while we are here. When you come back, I will go through the house with you and tell you what to do."

"Yes, mademoiselle," said Marie-Louise nervously--there was a sense of guilt upon her, but wherein lay the enormity of her offence she did not understand. Nevertheless, was not mademoiselle of the great world, and since mademoiselle was displeased, surely mademoiselle must know. She turned hastily from the room.

"No--wait!" Myrna's brain, for all her outward composure, was far from calm. It seemed as though the little stone she had started rolling down the hill in a--well, was it a whim?--was gathering many other stones in its course and developing into an avalanche. She had no desire to go into the details of the house with this Marie-Louise at that moment; on the contrary, it was absolutely impossible. The one thing she wanted was to be alone--to clear all this muddle out of her head. "No--wait!" she repeated. "There will be quite time enough to attend to that when Nanette and Jules arrive; and in the meantime you had better go down to the Bas Rhone and help Nanette if you can. When they are ready, come back with them."

"Nanette, mademoiselle? But I do not know who Nanette is."

"My maid," said Myrna tersely.

"Yes, mademoiselle"--Marie-Louise, with a quick nod, was running from the room. "At once, mademoiselle--as soon as I have put on my shoes and stockings."

Myrna tossed her sunbonnet on a chair, and walked over to the table to inspect the little clay figure. For ten minutes she stood in front of it, now frowning, now with unconscious admiration the dominant expression upon her face, now with puzzled bewilderment in her eyes. Of the technique of any art she not only knew nothing, but secretly held it in contempt; but she could not have been her father's daughter to have lacked a sense of appreciation for the beautiful. At the end of the ten minutes she picked up her sunbonnet again, and walked slowly out of the house.

At the headland's point, two hundred yards away, she sat down upon the rocks. She could not seem to get that little clay figure out of her head now. It was amazing how it took form before her eyes as realistically as though it were still in front of her! What a wonderful charm and appeal there was in it! She could see that for herself, even if her father had not grown so excited over it. "The greatest sculptor in France"--well, perhaps that was a little exaggerated! But her father was nevertheless acknowledged to be a critic second to none in the world of art, and he was far too chary of his reputation to sacrifice it on a myth. Certainly then, there was at least a promise in the man's work. What did her father mean to do? He had not rushed off that way for nothing. It was really charming, that little figure. She would get Jean to let her have it, buy it from him. Imagine possessing the first piece of his work, if the man ever amounted to anything!

She threw a stone out into the water, watched it splash, watched the spray of the breaking waves on what seemed like a reef away out to one side of the headland, and watched a boat coming shoreward from out beyond the reef again. There was a disturbed little gathering of her brows. But suppose she did buy it, the thing would crumble to pieces in a few days, and--stupid! Of course! Had she not been often in those dirty _ateliers_ that were always in a mess with their clay and their plaster? One could send it to Marseilles to have a cast made; and, afterwards, the cast could be sent home to Paris.

What was her father going to do with this "discovery" of his, as he called it? Discovery--_his_! A little thrill ran through her. It was not his discovery--it was _hers_! It was she who had discovered Jean Laparde--in that one look. The man's soul, a great smouldering volcano of emotion, was in his face, his eyes. It was amazing that this had happened; amazing almost beyond credence that, hidden in the little village, a fisherman, untaught, unconscious even of his own power, had produced a piece of work that had aroused her father, one of the great art critics in France, to such a pitch of elated excitement--but somehow it was not in the least bit amazing that it was _Jean Laparde_ who had done it!

Her eyes fixed again on the boat, that was well in now between the reef and the headland; and, with a sudden little gasp, she rose quickly to her feet--it was Jean Laparde himself. What splendid width of shoulder, what strength, and ease, and assurance in the sweep of the oars that bent the blades backward from swirling little eddies, that lifted the heavy boat to send it bounding forward as though it were a feather-weight. It was Jean Laparde--the fiance of Marie-Louise!

It was to the front at last, that thought! It had been dominant from the moment Marie-Louise had uttered the words, only she had attempted to ignore it, lose it in the other phases of this bewildering morning. But it was out now! Well, what of it? It was an impossible situation this that she had created, was it not? There was no use in denying even to herself that the man had aroused in her--what should she call it?--a desire to cultivate him a little, since he would be so new, so fresh, so quite different. And Marie-Louise was at the moment now actually in her employ as--one could not call her a servant, it was Marie-Louise's own house, and she was only there to help for a little while at the cure's request--but still--the colour burned red in Myrna's cheeks.

The next instant, she smiled a little. What a simpleton she was! What on earth did it matter! What could it possibly matter! Good heavens, she wasn't going to take this Jean Laparde away from Marie-Louise! _She_ wasn't going to marry him! There wasn't the slightest reason in the world why, just when the man turned out to be an embryonic genius and promised to prove really interesting, she should change her attitude toward him--and, anyway, it was almost a foregone conclusion that her father now would monopolise Jean Laparde morning, noon and night.

She glanced at the boat--and started abruptly for the house. To remain there would have been almost too obviously--a meeting. Jean had evidently not gone to the village at all with the other boats--she supposed there were other boats since the cure had spoken of them--but had come directly in from wherever he had been fishing.

She reached the house and through the window watched Jean send the boat sweeping up to the beach, leap from it, and, seemingly without exertion, pull it higher over the sand. He turned then, searching the house with his eyes; and suddenly placed his hands trumpet-fashion to his lips.

"Marie-Louise! Ho, Marie-Louise!" she heard him shout, as he came running up the cliff path from the beach.

Virile in movement, a striking figure, there seemed all of command, something heroic even in the rugged strength, something absolutely undauntable about the man. And then she laughed merrily to herself, as she stepped to the door. What a change! Who would have believed it! Jean, at sight of her, had stopped as though he had been struck, self-consciousness mocked at the air of command, and through the brown tan of his face crept the red.

"Oh, it is you, Jean!" she exclaimed.

Mechanically he reached up for his cap.

"I--I did not think that mademoiselle had got here yet," he said, the dark eyes in their steady gaze disconcertingly at variance with his stammering speech.

"We've been here ages," she told him quickly. "But the others have gone back again. Marie-Louise has gone to help Nanette with the things. And my father rushed off with that delightful old cure of yours to look for you."

"Rushed off to look for me?" echoed Jean in astonishment. "But I told Jacques Fregeau to tell you that I would come here as soon--"

"Yes, of course, to look for you--but not for the purpose you imagine!" she broke in smiling, and shook her head reproachfully at him. "Jean, do you know that I am quite angry with you! Come here!" She led the way into the house. "Now!"--pointing to the clay figure on the table. "Is not that your work?"

"But, yes, mademoiselle"--there was only a cursory glance at the beacon; his eyes were on this fresh, glorious, wonderful woman, whose white dress of some marvellous texture draped about her with such exquisite, dainty grace ... and the throat was bare, and full, and white as ivory is white ... that glint of bronze that was always playing over the massive coils of hair ... the playful severity in the pursed lips ... it was intoxication, it was fire ... he had been drunk with it all the night, all that morning in the boat while he had fished.

"Then why did you not tell me about it last night?" she demanded.

With a start, he shrugged his shoulders--and perplexity came.

"But it is nothing--that," he said slowly. "What was there to tell, mademoiselle?"

"Nothing!" She stared at him in amazement. "Do you really mean to say that you think it is--nothing?"

"But, of course!" he said simply.

And then suddenly she smiled, and shook her head at him again.

"Did I not tell you last night, Jean, that you were less like a fisherman than any man I had ever seen?"

"Yes; mademoiselle said that." Was there a word of hers that he had forgotten!

"Very well, then," she began magisterially, "since you think nothing of that little statue, I will tell you what I think. It is so much more than 'nothing' that I am going to buy it from you. It is"--her voice changed suddenly, soft in abandon, full in admiration--"oh, Jean, it is superb, magnificent; it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen; and--and I think I want it more than I have ever wanted anything before."

She had come closer to him, touched him, her hand was on his sleeve, her cheeks were flushed. That look--God, was he mad?--that _same_ look was in her eyes again. Yes, he was mad--with a madness that bade him sweep her into his arms and crush her there in all her alluring beauty. He was white--he felt the blood leave his face. She wanted that--wanted that bit of clay that _he_ had made!

"It is not for sale, mademoiselle," he said hoarsely; "it is yours."

"No, no, Jean!" she cried. "You do not understand. It is worth--oh, I do not know how much--ever so much money. Father will be able to tell us. It is on account of this that he rushed off to try and find you. He is terribly excited about it."

His hand at his side was clenched; his arm was rigid--he dared not move it for fear she might draw her hand away--it would not come often, a touch of intimacy like that. What did it matter about her father! What did anything matter--but that fiery tide that was whipping through his veins.

"It is good of monsieur, it is good of mademoiselle to praise it," he muttered.

"But it is not good of us!" she asserted earnestly. "Really, I must try to make you understand, Jean. I can't take it under false pretences, you know--you might hate me for it afterwards. I am sure you would. My father says it is a wonderful piece of work--that you are a great artist."

"I?" said Jean--and suddenly in a sweep of passion laughed a little fiercely. "Impossible! But it is enough that mademoiselle, for some reason that I cannot understand, thinks so much of it. It is hers."

"And I tell you that it is not impossible!" she insisted seriously. "Listen, Jean"--her hand closed a little tighter on his arm. "Suppose that I took it, accepted it, and some day you should find that it had become a tremendously famous thing--what then?"

"It would still be unworthy of mademoiselle," he answered, in a low tone.

With a little gasp, she drew back a step and looked at him--but it was the grey eyes that dropped, and for a moment to Jean, unconscious of his own tense poise, the rapt burning in his eyes, she seemed all glorious with that play of colour now that was even in the pulsing throat. But the next instant she was smiling radiantly.

"Thank you, Jean," she said naively. "I will take it very gladly, and I will always keep it. Father will have a cast of it made at once, and--" she stopped suddenly, turning quickly toward the door. "Listen!" she said. "That's the motor, isn't it? Marie-Louise must have met it on the road."

An automobile had come to a stop by the side of the house; and, a moment later, a girl's voice, high-pitched in sarcasm, reached them.

"_Ma foi_! Fancy! She owns the house! What an aristocrat! No doubt she will expect mademoiselle and monsieur to invite her to table with them next! Oh, _la, la_, but you have lots to learn, _ma petite paysanne_!"

"Oh, let her alone, Nanette!" exclaimed a man's voice sharply. "She has done nothing but answer your own questions, except"--with a laugh--"that she has ridden on the front seat!"

It seemed to come with a shock to Jean that snatch of conversation, as something cold, chilling the fire that but an instant gone had been raging within him. It was an arraignment of himself, a slap in the face, sharply, curtly given, a reminder that for all his temerity he was--a fisherman. Myrna had gone to the front door. He swept his hand in a dazed way across his eyes, then straightened suddenly--it was a spell that he had been under. Nor was the spell gone; but now, at least, he was in control of himself. He walked across the room to where Myrna stood.

"Mademoiselle," he offered quietly, "can I help with the baggage?"

She turned to him, smiling.

"Oh, if you will, Jean!" she cried gratefully. "Please help Jules with the trunks. And afterwards"--her hand was on his sleeve again--"though I must see about arranging things, you mustn't go away. Father will be back shortly, and you must wait."

"I will wait," said Jean.

-- VII --

WHERE GLORY AWAITS

His back to the cliff, and leaning against the gunwale of his boat, which on landing a little while ago he had drawn up on the beach, Jean dug abstractedly at the sand with the toe of his boot. He had helped Jules, the chauffeur, to carry the baggage into the house, where Myrna Bliss, her maid and Marie-Louise were now busily engaged within--occasionally he could hear one or other of their voices--and he was waiting. What for? He did not know. He had promised her that he would wait. Her father wanted to see him because he made _poupees_ out of clay, and because he had made that little statue which, somehow, had so delighted her. It was very curious--very curious that a little thing like that should have taken their fancy!

His hand passed nervously across his forehead. But that was of no account, the statue! There were other things. He was living in a dream--no, not a dream--something much more vital than a dream. From a dream one awoke, and the dream was dispelled. He was awake now and the spell was still upon him. In her presence he lost his reason, his being seemed to become a seething furnace of passion that consumed him; away from her, some strange, magnetic power kept bidding him return, kept his mind picturing her, kept his thoughts upon her. It was but half an hour ago that, alone with her in the cottage, he had almost utterly lost control of himself.

A hot flush was on his cheeks. It was bad, that! Some day he would lose control of himself completely; some day the impulse to crush that ravishing form in his arms, to look deep into those laughing, self-possessed grey eyes until the laughter and the self-possession were gone and he was master, would prove too strong for him. And then--what?

His hands clenched at his sides, the broad shoulders sloped a little forward. Well--what then? His brain would not answer him, save only with that persistent "she was a woman and he was a man." He laughed shortly aloud. Was that true? How true was it? He glanced mockingly at his clothes; his hands unclenched, and, feeling in a sort of tentative way, slid along the gunwale of the boat. Yes; it was quite evident that he was what he had always been, what he always would be--a fisherman. It was quite evident too that he was mad. It was only last night that he had seen her for the first time, only since last night that this enchantment had fallen upon him--and now it possessed him, mind, soul and body. One could not credit that! He laughed out again--and suddenly the laugh died on his lips.

He had heard no step upon the sand, but a hand now touched his arm. He turned quickly. It was Marie-Louise. He had forgotten all about Marie-Louise--since yesterday evening. He had seen her of course since then, had walked home with her after that meeting on the bridge, had called out for her when he had landed here on the beach a little while ago, but for all that Marie-Louise had been forgotten.

"Jean"--she was speaking in a low, anxious voice--"it's--it's not true, is it, Jean?"

The dark eyes were trying to smile through a troubled mist; the lips, that he remembered he had likened yesterday to the divinely modelled lips of that dream statue, were quivering now.

Jean stared at her. What would she be like if she were dressed in clothes, marvellous, dainty things, such as Myrna Bliss wore, with little shoes and silken ankles? She was pretty of course, Marie-Louise had always been pretty; but there was not the physical thrill, the witchery in the eyes that turned his head. She was more sober--yes, that was it--more sober. Marie-Louise took things more seriously, and--

"Jean!" She seemed almost frightened now in her appeal. "Did you not hear me? Jean--it isn't true, is it?"

"True?" Jean roused himself with a little start. "What is not true? I do not know what you are talking about."

"The beacon, Jean"--she spoke hurriedly, breathlessly now. "A few minutes ago mademoiselle told me to put it in the room she has chosen for herself, and to be very careful of it because--because"--her voice broke suddenly--"because she said that you had given it to her. Jean--it's not true, is it?"

For a moment Jean did not speak. There were tears in her eyes! A twinge of guilty confusion seized him. Yes, it was so--Marie-Louise had been forgotten. Yesterday he had given it to Marie-Louise. But who would have thought it would make any difference to her--a thing like that! She was perhaps angry for the moment, but it would be only for the moment.

"_Mais, sacre nom_!" he exclaimed, and forced a laugh. "And what of it? It is nothing! I will make you another."

She did not answer; but into the brown eyes came a miserable hurt, and into the face a sudden whiteness. It was only the day before that he had given it to her, and had said it was a beacon, and that the beacon was herself with arms outstretched to welcome him always. It had meant so much to her--and now it seemed to have meant so little to Jean.

Jean shifted uneasily, as she did not speak.

"I will make you another, Marie-Louise," he blurted out appeasingly. "To-day--to-morrow--whenever you like, I will make you another. Then it will be all right, eh, _petite_?"

She shook her head--and the words came very slowly.

"You can never make another beacon, Jean."

"How--not another?" he cried impetuously. "I can make a thousand! Did I not tell you that it was you--has it not those lips that I could fashion even in the dark, even if you were far away from me! _Tiens_, do you not see--I could make a thousand! And to-morrow you shall have another."

The dark eyes were full.

"Was it yours to give, Jean?" she asked.

It was true! He had nothing to say to that. She was crying. He was angry now because he could say nothing, because there was no excuse for what he had done--and yet he would do it again. But he could not tell Marie-Louise that though, _pardieu_! She would only cry the harder. And because she was right and he had nothing to say, he groped, angry with himself, for some defence.

"Ah!" he burst out sharply. "So that is it! Yesterday you would have thought nothing of it, but now you have been listening to what they say, and you believe it all--that it is worth a great deal of money, maybe a hundred francs, eh? Well, it is not--it is worth nothing! You have nothing to cry over."

Wide-eyed, as though a whip-lash had curled across her face, she drew back, her small hands shut tightly at her sides, as she looked at him. And then somehow that little prayer that she had prayed to the _bon Dieu_ last night came back to her--"make me that, _mon Pere_; make me that--Jean's beacon all through my life"--and the bitter words that were on her lips were crowded back, and she turned slowly away.

But now Jean caught her arm.

"No, no, Marie-Louise, I did not mean that!" he cried penitently. "See, I did not mean that!"

She made no answer. Her head was averted; her eyes fixed far out over the water.

Jean bit his lips. Certainly he had had no right to give it away, but it was a small matter to make such a fuss over, and he had already promised her another. Was it possible that she had sensed anything of the wild passion that had come upon him for this beautiful American! Was she already jealous? Well, it was easily knocked out of her head, that--if one took the bull by the horns! And if he were mad it was no reason that hurt should come to Marie-Louise because of it. Some day it would be all over this madness, and was it not Marie-Louise and he who were to make their little home together? He forced a laugh again, and caught her shoulders and drew her closer.

"Confess, Marie-Louise," he said teasingly, "that it is because I gave it to another woman. Is it not so, eh? That you are--oh, _la, la_!--that little Marie-Louise is jealous of mademoiselle."

Her head lifted, a new light suddenly in her eyes--one of incredulous amazement.

"Jealous of mademoiselle!" she repeated wonderingly. "Of mademoiselle who is of the _grand monde_ and so far above us and not of our world at all--and you who are a fisherman! How could I be jealous? How could such a thing be possible? Oh, Jean, don't you understand, it is not that you gave it to her--it is that you gave it at all."

"But what does it matter, then," demanded Jean, inwardly relieved, "since I will make you as many more as you please? To-morrow you shall have another much better than this one."

Footsteps sounded from the gravel walk on the cliff above; and Marie-Louise, glancing around, lifted Jean's hands from her shoulders.

"I have told you, Jean, that you can never make another," she said, with a little catch in her voice; then hurriedly: "It is mademoiselle and her father coming to see you. I must go."

"And I have told you," declared Jean, with sudden, fierce assertion, "that I can make a thousand, and all better than this one!"

She bent her head to hide the blinding tears that were filling her eyes again. It meant nothing to him, that which had been so great a pledge to her. It was only a _poupee_, a clay doll, one of dozens that he had given to the children to amuse them. And the things he had said about it meant nothing--they had only been words--only words, but she could not forget them. A little sob rose in her throat, and was choked bravely back. They were coming down the path now, mademoiselle and her father, and she must go.

"You do not understand," she said brokenly--and, turning, ran quickly along the beach.

For a space Jean watched her as she sped over the sand, until, ignoring the path, she climbed lithely up the rocks at the far end of the beach, and disappeared in the direction of the house. His hand, a knotted lump, drawn back for a smashing blow on the gunwale of the boat, a blow that should relieve his feelings, opened hesitantly instead and passed a little dazedly across his eyes.

"_Sacre maudit_!" he muttered in slow earnestness under his breath.

Since last night the world was upside-down! Since last night he did not know himself! He knew nothing! Only that all Bernay-sur-Mer was changed. That everything was changed. That he had made Marie-Louise cry. That they had talked about that accursed piece of clay that had made Marie-Louise cry, as though it were worth talking about!

"_Sacre maudit_!" muttered Jean again. "What does it all mean?"

And then he was watching her, this glorious American, coming now along the beach toward him with the man who Marie-Louise had said was mademoiselle's father.

"Jean!"--she was calling out to him. "Here is father at last! Did you think we were never coming?"

Two hands fell upon his shoulders, holding him off at arms' length; and the man, with frank eagerness, was staring into his face. Over her father's shoulder, Myrna was laughing roguishly.

"So you are Jean Laparde?" Henry Bliss exclaimed heartily. "Well, well! My daughter told me I would lose half my surprise when I had a good look at you, and I am free to admit she was right." One hand fell from Jean's shoulder, caught Jean's hand and wrung it in a genial grip. "Well, Jean, my boy, I want to say to you that if you will listen to me, this will be a day that you will remember as long as you live."

From one to the other Jean stared bewilderedly.

"It is to the clay figure that monsieur refers, I know," he said slowly; "but I do not understand. Mademoiselle was kind enough to praise it, but--" He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly.

"But--nothing!" laughed Henry Bliss impulsively. "Here--sit down!" He sat down himself on the boat's gunwale, and turned to his daughter. "Myrna, we're going to talk business--are you going to stay?"

"Of course, I'm going to stay!" she declared merrily, perching herself beside her father and smiling up at Jean, who still remained standing. "It will take both of us to convince him. Jean, father wants to take you to Paris."

"To Paris!"--the words came from Jean with a sort of startled jerk. His eyes searched the two faces for an instant uncertainly, and then he smiled incredulously. "Mademoiselle is pleased to have a little joke with me--yes?" he said quietly.

It was Henry Bliss who answered.

"Indeed, she is not!" he asserted, with brisk emphasis. "That is exactly what I have to propose, my boy. My daughter tells me she cannot make you believe that the superb little statue you have made amounts to anything more than a gouged-out piece of mud. I'm not so much surprised that you have not sensed its actual worth, for I think that almost invariably the really big men in art, the men of real genius, are the last to appreciate themselves; but the astounding thing is that you have seen nothing in it at all. As a matter of fact, I can't believe it. It is impossible! It is simply that you have given it no thought. Think a little about it, Jean. How did you come to make it? How did you conceive it? Where did you get your model?"

"But I do not know," said Jean a little absently--something, the fire, the enthusiasm, the earnestness in the other's voice was kindling a strange response within him. "I do not know. I think it was the bronze statue in the great square of the city."

"The--what?" demanded Henry Bliss quickly. "What city? I know them all--and I do not recall anything that could have served as a model for you."

"And you told me, Jean," Myrna added, wagging her finger at him in pretty reproach, "that you had never been away from Bernay-sur-Mer."

Jean laughed uncomfortably, self-consciously.

"It is nothing!" he said. "You do not understand. It is foolish! The statue and the square and the city are only in the dream that comes sometimes."

"Ah--a dream!" ejaculated Henry Bliss, with a quick nod of his head.

"Oh, Jean!" Myrna clapped her hands delightedly. "Tell us about it."

"There is nothing to tell, mademoiselle," he replied, colouring. "It is just a dream that comes sometimes when I am fishing, when I lie awake at night, when I am not thinking of it. That is all, mademoiselle. It means nothing."

"It means a great deal!" said Henry Bliss, jumping excitedly to his feet. "And at least it should help you to understand that it is not so impossible after all when I tell you that, barring little crudities of technique that are a paltry consideration, there is no sculptor in France to-day could produce a piece of work comparable to that which you have done."

Jean's lips were slightly parted. Excitement was upon him too. A strange stirring was in his soul.

"But I cannot believe that," he said in a low voice.

Henry Bliss's hands were on Jean's shoulders once more, pressing them in a hard, earnest grip.

"Nevertheless, it is true!" he asserted forcibly, "You do not know me; but those who do could tell you that I am qualified to speak. And I tell you that it is true. I tell you that in Paris fame, wealth, the greatest name in France awaits you! You are through to-day with this life forever, my boy, if you will come with me to Paris."

Fame, wealth, the greatest name in France! Jean felt the blood leave his face. His brain seemed to whirl and to be afire. Yes, those were the words, and the man was not playing with him; but it was some wild hallucination, some bizarre mistake. To-day, to be through with the hard, penniless life of a fisherman forever--and to work hereafter only with what before had been his play! No, that was not true--it could not be true. He meant well, this man, the father of the girl whose eyes seemed to burn into his now and insist too that it was true, but the little statue had been too easily done to be anything more than perhaps a pretty little thing. Fame, a great name--that strange stirring of his soul again! God, why had this man aroused that thought within him, when it was not, could not be true?

"Monsieur," he said, and his voice in its hoarseness sounded strangely in his own ears; "monsieur, has made a mistake. It cannot be so."

"Think so!" returned Henry Bliss bluntly. "I do not make mistakes of that kind, my boy. But I will convince you. In a few days you will see. I have telegraphed for some of the famous critics of France, men of the Academy, men whose names are known all over Europe, and they will tell you what I have told you--and their despair that it is I, not they, who have discovered you will be so pitifully genuine that even you will understand. And to-morrow we will motor to Marseilles and get some modelling clay for you, and you will see for yourself what you can do with that. And then, Jean, you will go to Paris with me--and work."

"If it were true, if it should be true," said Jean numbly, "still I could not go. One does not make _sous_ enough at the fishing to go to Paris."

"But, great heavens!" ejaculated Henry Bliss. "That is precisely what I am offering you, young man--money. I am rich. I will pay every expense. I will establish you."

Jean shook his head.

"I could not do that--take your money," he said simply.

"Couldn't take it!" exploded the American earnestly--and then he laughed--and then grew serious once more. "Listen, my boy! I do not want you to think for a moment that this is a purely charitable little scheme on my part--far from it! It is most of it, I am afraid, utter selfishness. I love art--for many years I have devoted myself to it. I cannot create myself--God knows the miserable attempts and the miserable failures that have been mine!--and so I have tried to help others to do what I could not do myself"--Henry Bliss was smiling now in a kindly, wistful way. "And now to discover the greatest sculptor of the age, to bring him out of obscurity into fame and power--can you not see, Jean, how selfish I am? And so why do you stand there hesitating?"

Into Myrna's face, for the girl had risen and was now standing beside them, into the man's face so close to his, Jean stared--and then his eyes swept about him, over his surroundings. It was magnificent, but it was not reality--for here was the beach, and here was the boat, and in the boat were his nets, and there was the nick in the handle of the oar where he had fended off that night from the Perigeau Reef, and out there, surf-splashed, was the reef itself, and his clothes were the same rough, coarse clothes that he always wore just like every other fisherman in Bernay-sur-Mer. It was magnificent, but it was not reality--and yet his heart was pounding with mighty hammer beats, and the blood was surging fiercely through his veins.

"And as for the money," Henry Bliss went on quietly. "You need have no qualms on that score, my boy. Pay it back by all means, if you'll feel the better for it. In a year, two years, you'll be a wealthy man. Why, Jean, don't you understand--there isn't one of the men who will be here shortly but would pay you any price you chose to ask for that little statue you gave to my daughter here? So, even on a basis of dollars and cents alone, as it stands now, you couldn't owe me anything, don't you see?"

What were they saying to him! Fame, a great sculptor, wealth, a name, his name, the name of Jean Laparde to be known throughout all France! Why did it come back to him now, that night of the great storm when he had stood and watched the scene, rapt and awed, on his way to Marie-Louise? What strange blasphemy was that, that had been his, that had envied the _bon Dieu_ the creation of that mighty picture?

"Jean"--Myrna had caught his arm, her head was between her father's now and his, the soft, bronzed hair for an instant brushed his forehead, her breath was on his cheek, the grey eyes were smiling into his--"Jean, wouldn't you like to go to Paris?"

To Paris! She lived in Paris--she was always in Paris--always there. A day, a week, two weeks, a month he would have seen her here--in Paris there would be neither days nor weeks nor months to count. The grey eyes were veiled suddenly, demurely, under the long lashes--but the little hand on his arm, with a quick, added pressure, remained. His head swam dizzily--there was an untamed, pulsing elation upon him, a greed for her that racked and tormented him, a greed to clasp her head between his hands and lift up her face and press kiss after kiss upon those eyelids, that mouth, until in the very insatiability of his passion she should fling her arms around his neck and return his embrace!

"Yes--_yes_!" he said tensely, fiercely. "_Mon Dieu_, yes--I would like to go to Paris!"

Her hand fell from his arm.

"Oh, Jean--I'm so glad!"--it seemed as though she were whispering softly to him.

"Good!" cried Henry Bliss enthusiastically, with a double slap on Jean's shoulder.

Jean did not speak. It was not easy in an instant to quench that fire that was devouring him, it was not easy to understand that to-day all his life was to be changed. He looked at Myrna--the grey eyes were gaily mocking him, as she nodded her head. He looked at her father--Henry Bliss was laughing ingenuously like a pleased school-boy.

"I know just how you feel!" said Henry Bliss genially. "All up in the air--eh? Well, I feel that way myself. It is the most amazing thing that ever happened! It seems as though there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask you all at once. And to begin with, those _poupees_ now, how did you--no, hold on! Myrna, we'll motor over to Marseilles for the clay to-day, instead of waiting until to-morrow. We'll have something else to show old Bidelot by the time he gets here! You go up to the house and order an early luncheon. Jean will join us, and we'll have from now to Marseilles and back again to talk."

"Splendid!" agreed Myrna. "You will, won't you, Jean?"

"I?" said Jean, in sudden dismay. He, to eat with the _grand monde_! But perhaps he had not understood--they would give him lunch with Jules and Nanette and Marie-Louise. He had heard Nanette make that very plain to Marie-Louise a little while ago. "I--I have my dinner with me," he stammered, and pointed to a paper parcel in the stern of the boat. "I will be ready when mademoiselle and monsieur are ready."

"Oh, will you?" laughed Henry Bliss. "Well, I guess not! You'll come up and lunch with Myrna and me."

"No," said Jean, embarrassed, "I--"

"Yes, you will," insisted Henry Bliss.

"Why, Jean," expostulated Myrna, "of course you will, we--" she stopped abruptly. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "I think I know! It's what that stupid Nanette said to Marie-Louise about sitting at table with us, isn't it?"

"What's that?" demanded Henry Bliss quickly. "What has Marie-Louise to do with--h'm--yes--I remember"--his face screwed up perplexedly. "Her fiance, she said--h'm--yes--it _is_ a bit awkward, isn't it?"

"It's nothing of the kind!" declared Myrna, and, with a laugh, possessed herself of the paper parcel from the boat. "It's quite a different matter. If only half of what father has said is true, Jean, it would be an honour for any one to have Jean Laparde as a guest. And anyway I've got your lunch now!" She waved it in the air, threatening him merrily with it; then turned, and ran toward the house. "You come when you're called, sir!" she flung back over her shoulder, laughing again.

-- VIII --

SHADOWS BEFORE

Who, in all France, a week ago, had heard of Bernay-sur-Mer? Upon whose lips to-day was not the name of that little Mediterranean village? Men, the great men of France, came at the bidding of their confrere, the American millionaire art-critic; came sceptically--and stayed to wonder. And because there were no accommodations in Bernay-sur-Mer, they made their headquarters at Marseilles, and their daily pilgrimages from there; an arrangement that, if in a measure inconvenient, was not without its compensation, for at Marseilles was being made the plaster cast of that exquisite little figure, fashioned so amazingly from scarcely more than mud, that marked a new epoch to them in the world of sculpture, the birth of a supreme genius, a surpassing glory for the art of France!

They came and watched Jean at his work; for there was clay now such as Jean had never imagined, clay that seemed to give form itself, of its own initiative, to wonderful conceptions. They watched and marvelled; and at night they carried him back with them to Marseilles to fete him, until indeed to Jean the world of yesterday was as some vast haze, befogged, that had shut down behind him.

"In a year, with the study of technique in Paris!" murmured Henry Bliss ecstatically.

And old Bidelot, seventy years of age, grizzle-haired, the most caustic, bitter critic of them all, stormed in his wrath.

"Technique! You talk of technique--for _him_! He is a school in himself--a school that will revolutionise the art. You talk of technique for a genius awakened out of the sleep of ignorance, who in a day accomplishes undying work that no other man in Paris, in Rome--bah! where you will--could accomplish in twice a lifetime! You are senile, my poor friend Bliss--you are in your dotage!"

Jean Laparde! Was it possible that this was Jean Laparde? The simple fisherfolk stared awe-struck at each other, at the metamorphosis that had come to Bernay-sur-Mer, at the great people who came and went, to whom one instinctively lifted one's hat--the great people who now lifted their hats to Jean. It was true! Could they not see with their own eyes? One, too, then, should lift one's hat to Jean. And did not the good Father Anton read to them from the newspapers that all France was ringing with the name of Jean Laparde?

"_Sacre nom d'un miracle_!" swore Pierre Lachance heavily. "And once he made clay _poupees_ for little Ninon! _Bon Dieu_, think of that!"

Bernay-sur-Mer had set Jean apart, above itself.

But the old cure was troubled in his heart. And one night, after a week had gone since the American strangers had come to Bernay-sur-Mer, Father Anton shook his head over his newspaper as he read of Jean Laparde--and found difficulty with his spectacles, for his thoughts were of Marie-Louise.

It was only a week ago that she had come to him so happily, so gladly, the proud light in her eyes, to talk of the great thing Jean had done--and she had changed a great deal in the week. The proud light would come back quickly enough at mention of Jean, but she had grown strangely quiet and silent. And Jean, too, had changed. It seemed, as indeed it was true, that Jean was no longer one of the village.

The old priest took off his offending spectacles, rubbed them with his handkerchief, and replaced them only to find that the mistiness was in his own wet eyes.

Jean did not seem the same in his new clothes. Of course, it was quite natural that Jean should have discarded his fisherman's dress. Mademoiselle Bliss had said very truly that though it might be picturesque in Bernay-sur-Mer, in Paris it would be only eccentric; and besides, to go to Marseilles with his new friends of his new world, one needed to be dressed as they were not to be ridiculous. Monsieur Bliss had been very generous. The American was very whole-heartedly interested in his protege. Jean would lack for nothing that either money or influence could procure.

But it was not only the clothes--Jean himself had changed. Father Anton shook his head again slowly. It had come gradually during the week, and he, who loved Jean as a son, had not failed to see it. At first it had been amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, then a dawning belief in the genius of his power that they preached to him, and then a fierce assurance that it was so; it had begun with wonder at the camaraderie with which the famous men who had come there treated him, at the respect that Bernay-sur-Mer paid to him--and it had ended with the acceptance of it as his due, and had come to be looked for with a tinge of arrogance as though he had drunk of heady wine. Yes, it was a change! Jean was afire now, a different man, consumed, possessed with the lure of fame, the golden vista that was before his eyes, steeping his soul in it, reaching out to it, straining toward it like a young eagle that suddenly liberated from captivity takes wings to the great void.

And so the paper slid unheeded to the floor from the old priest's knees that night, a week after the American strangers had come to Bernay-sur-Mer, and the spectacles were removed again--but this time the eyes were wiped. He was glad for Jean, proud in his love for the greatness that was to come--but somehow in his heart there was sadness, too. It seemed that between Marie-Louise and Jean a shadow crept, and lengthened, and there was a parting of the ways.

"I love you both, my children, Marie-Louise and Jean," the old cure whispered. "I am an old man. Perhaps I am foolish in my fears. I pray the good God for you both."

-- IX --

FORKED ROADS

It was the room Myrna Bliss had occupied. Mother Fregeau had insisted; Jacques Fregeau had implored. It was fitting that the best at the Bas Rhone should be Jean's. The little back room that had been his for ten years was quite impossible. It was different now. It would be but to make him ridiculous--what with all these grand strangers that were around him! And besides, _merveille du bon Dieu_, was he not now himself the greatest of the great ones!

In through the window the late afternoon sun played over the faded wallpaper of the _chambre de luxe_; from without there was the hum of voices, exclamations of amazement, cries of delight and admiration, the curious composite sound of a gathered, eager crowd. And Jean, well back from the sill that he might not be seen, glanced outside, it was his--his! The work that he had done during the past week in the _atelier_ they had made for him in the barn behind the Bas Rhone! It was finished! Monsieur Bidelot was exhibiting it now to Bernay-sur-Mer. The great Academician was standing in the tonneau of the automobile and holding it up for every one to look at--the fisherman with his boat and net in clay. Ah, they understood that, the people of Bernay-sur-Mer! But they understood only that it was magnificent because Bidelot and Monsieur Bliss and the great men who had come amongst them told them that it was magnificent.

For years he had made the _poupees_, and they had seen nothing--and he had seen nothing. But now they knew because they were told; and now he knew because his soul, his brain was ablaze with the knowledge of creative power, because what had gone before was nothing, because what was to come would sweep the past, that little thing that Bidelot in his emotion cried over, into insignificance.

He drew back, his head high; his outflung arms, hands clenched, stretched heavenward. These strangers, these great critics had said it, and it was so! The name of Jean Laparde would never die!

He stripped off the long sculptor's apron that covered him from neck to knees, and held it out at arm's length, gazing first at it and then at the rough fisherman's clothes that hung, where Mother Fregeau had placed them, on the end peg on the wall--a little apart, significantly it seemed, whether by accident or design, from the new clothes that had come from Marseilles. And then he laughed out suddenly in a quick, exalted way, and tossed the apron on the bed. It was all changed, that! He was through with the fisherman's dress, he was through with Bernay-sur-Mer! To-night he was to dine with Bidelot and a score of others in Marseilles, and after that in a few days it would be--Paris.

He undressed hurriedly, and began to dress again in a clean suit--but a little slowly now, none too deftly. They were still strange to him these clothes; but then everything was strange. The people around him were strange. At times he felt awkward, constrained in their presence--and at times he could laugh down at them as from a superior height. Ay, he could laugh--they were at his feet! Only--he frowned heavily--he could not laugh at Myrna Bliss. He was not master there! And yet she, somehow, did not erect the barrier. It was himself that did that--because he could not forget that behind the roguish smile in the grey eyes might lurk the thought that, after all, he was only a fisherman.

A fisherman! They were cheering now outside. His hands shut tightly. A fisherman! He was no longer a fisherman! He was Jean Laparde, a sculptor of France, a man before whom lay a path of glory, a man whom the nation would acclaim, a man of whose future all stood in envy! They had told him that, these men whom France had already honoured, these men who had accepted him as more than their equal. But there was no need for them to tell him--he knew it in his soul. None, no man, the world itself, could hold back now the genius of Jean Laparde!

Paris! He was pacing the room now, his eyes afire. To-morrow or the next day, when the Blisses had made their plans, Paris and fame was his. What a life it was that now opened out before him! A place amongst the highest, the world to resound with the name of Jean Laparde--and those grey eyes, that bronze hair, that glorious beauty of the American--God! he would immortalise her in clay, in bronze, in marble.

Ay, they might well cheer while the chance was theirs, these people of Bernay-sur-Mer! To-morrow or the next day he would be saying good-bye to them, and--he stood suddenly still--and good-bye, too, to Marie-Louise. The thought put a damper upon his spirits; his brows gathered in deep furrows of impatient perplexity.

He had not seen much of Marie-Louise in the last week--he had seen her scarcely at all. Only twice--when she with many others had stood in the doorway to watch his work. She had smiled at him then, as though it were her work, too, as though it were a joint proprietorship--but she had gone before he could speak to her. And at the cottage, when he had been there at the invitation of Myrna or her father, Marie-Louise, strangely enough, now that he thought of it, was never to be seen.

He would have to speak to her, of course, about going away; but what chance, with the whirl he had been in, had he had to do it? She would know that he was going to Paris, for everybody knew it--but he would have to speak to her himself about it before he went. And what was he to say? Certainly, he loved Marie-Louise--but the great chance of his life was before him. What was he to say to her? He would go to Paris for a time, make this great name for himself, and then afterwards--_what_?

He refused to tolerate the question. He had refused to tolerate it all week. It was enough for the present that he was going for a time to Paris. Marie-Louise was sensible enough not to make a scene. She could see readily enough that he must go and that she must stay. How, for instance, could she associate with women of fashion and society like Myrna Bliss, who would be the women of the new world that must necessarily form part of his life hereafter. What was he thinking of? Was it the "afterwards" again? Was he not coming back to Marie-Louise? Was he choosing now between his art and Marie-Louise? No; he was not--he would not! That was an issue for the future. It would work itself out. Why should he plague himself about it!

He loved Marie-Louise, of course; but it would have been easier now if there had been nothing between them. He could not go to Marie-Louise and say: Marie-Louise, I love you; but it is finished--you can see that the _grand monde_ would make a very great difference between Jean Laparde, the great sculptor, and Marie-Louise the fisherwoman of Bernay-sur-Mer. No; he could not say that, but--_sacre nom_!--was he back to the everlasting "afterwards" again, when he refused so resolutely to go beyond the present? Was it not enough that he was simply going to Paris for a time--a matter that would seem natural enough to her, and of which she would be glad because great things had come to him? He would talk to her like that--that would be enough--Marie-Louise was a sensible girl. One could not say to her that it would be better to finish everything, he would never say that to Marie-Louise--but if, _par example_, he and Marie-Louise had never talked of the marriage there would be nothing now to trouble him. And--he swung around sharply as a knock sounded on the door.

"Come!" he called.

Papa Fregeau stuck in his head.

"_Pardon_, Monsieur Jean"--it was "monsieur" now--"it is Mademoiselle Bliss who is alone in the cafe below. Will Monsieur Jean see her for a moment before he goes out?"

"In an instant," Jean answered quickly. "Tell mademoiselle that I will be there in an instant."

Papa Fregeau hesitated, stared about the room, and stared at Jean, his fat cheeks grotesquely expanded--and his arms rose suddenly in a gesture of profound helplessness.

"_Mon Dieu_!" he muttered heavily. "Is it possible that it is our little Jean there--ah, _pardon_"--he stammered--"_Monsieur_ Jean"--and made a hasty exit from the room, as though utterly confounded at his own temerity.

But Jean, following his reply, had paid no further attention to Papa Fregeau. He had learned to knot the long, flowing tie that Myrna had chosen as part of his dress, for she had said, had she not, that it was the tie the artists wore in Paris? He knotted it now with extra care, put on his coat, snatched up his hat, and ran downstairs to the cafe below.

She was waiting for him back by the little _comptoir_ where he had stood that evening when she had first spoken to him. She had been like a glorious vision that had burst suddenly upon him that evening--she was a thousand times more glorious now, for her smile was eager with an intimacy that promised--what did it promise? He did not know. It was there--and her eyes were shining, and the white throat was divinely beautiful--and the thrill of her presence quickened the beat of his heart.

Her laugh rang through the room, silver-toned.

"Jean," she cried merrily, "you are harder to see these days than a prime minister! What do you mean, sir? Have you deserted us?"

"_Ma foi_!" protested Jean, a little anxiously. "Mademoiselle does not mean that! Was I not at lunch with her to-day, and yesterday, and the day before that?"

"Yes, and all day at the work, and every evening in Marseilles"--she manufactured a dainty pout through her smile. "And even now that I have snatched a little moment, I must not keep you for they are waiting for you outside."

"Let them wait!" said Jean tensely.

"Oh, no; we mustn't do that," she said laughingly, shaking her head. "So listen, Jean. I have come to tell you that--can you guess what? That you are not going to Paris with us after all."

"Not going to Paris!"--Jean gazed at her bewilderedly, as he repeated the words.

"With _us_--silly boy!" she smiled teasingly. "Are you disappointed?"

She teased, and mocked, and delighted him, and fired his blood by amazing and elusive turns. He could not cope with her yet.

"But mademoiselle knows," he blundered. "I--I do not understand. It is a great disappointment."

"Then it mustn't be!" she declared brightly. "For it is my idea, and if you are not pleased with it, it is I who will be terribly disappointed. It is just a little while ago that father and I arranged the plans. We are to go to-morrow direct to Paris, and as soon as we get there--now listen very attentively, Jean!--we are going to pick out an _atelier_ for you and fit it up. And you are not to come until we send you word that everything is ready. And the day you arrive I shall be hostess at the studio at a reception to which all Paris will be invited. Everybody that is worth while will come, and your entree will be a triumph. Now, Jean, will that not be splendid?"

She was smiling at him, vivacious, flushed with excitement. Splendid--yes, it would be splendid! An entree to Paris like that! It was the first tangible glimpse of reality out of the chaotic blaze of luring, golden dreams.

"It--it is too good of mademoiselle!" he stammered excitedly.

Low, musical, her laugh rippled through the room again, as she looked at him. The man was magnificent--the head, the shoulders, the splendid strength, the mobile, changing lights and shadows in his face like a child who had not yet learned to mask its emotions, and all this coupled with the deliciously picturesque background of the discovery of his art, would make him the rage in Paris. Paris would literally go wild over him! And she? Well, he would be still more a new sensation than ever--and perhaps, who knew?--but the man was too easily aroused--and then there was the possibility that her father, that Bidelot and the others had overrated him, that he would be but the phenomenon of the moment, only to sink after a while into uninteresting mediocrity--she would see. But for the present at least Paris would echo and re-echo with the name of Jean Laparde. Her eyebrows arched demurely, innocently. There was something else she had to say to Jean. She had never spoken to him of Marie-Louise--naturally. But she must speak now. Marie-Louise, a peasant girl, a bare-footed fisherwoman, in Paris as Jean's fiancee was perfectly impossible!

"Jean," she said ingenuously, "you know we took the cottage without much formality as far as any definite length of time was concerned. Of course we expected to stay longer, and if all this had not happened we certainly should have done so. So, do you think, when we speak to Marie-Louise about going, that she would be perfectly satisfied with a month's rent? I told father I would ask you."

Jean's face clouded.

"You have not told Marie-Louise then that you are going to-morrow?" he asked slowly.

"How could we--when we did not know ourselves until a little while ago?" she answered.

"No; that is so," he said. Then, with a short, conscious laugh: "I have not spoken to Marie-Louise myself."

"Of course you haven't!" she returned quickly, "And you have been wise."

"Wise?"--Jean looked at her, puzzled.

"Marie-Louise is not blind," said Myrna quietly. "It is far better that she should have seen things for herself--and she could not help seeing them during the last week."

"You mean?" Jean began--and stopped.

"You know what I mean, Jean," she said gravely. "That she must have seen what everybody else sees--what you see yourself. That if she ever had any idea of going to Paris with you, it is quite out of the question. It is different now--everything is changed. You are not a fisherman any longer; you have a great place to take in the world that she cannot take beside you. A week in Paris and, even if neither of you see it now, you would both see it only too bitterly and clearly then. For both your sakes it is better settled now."

Jean was staring across the room to where, outside, the crowd was packed densely in the road. Had he not thought of just those things that she had been saying? Had he not thought of them all week? They were true; but still there was Marie-Louise who--what was that? They were cheering him there outside--it made his blood tingle, he felt the mad elation of it, his soul seemed to leap out to meet the acclaim!

"But that is not all, Jean"--she was speaking again. "There is another thing, something you owe to--oh, how shall I say it?--to your country, and--" She stopped suddenly and caught his arm. "Listen!" she breathed. "Listen!"

It was Bidelot, the great Academician, his voice raised in impassioned words. Through the window they could see him standing, bare-headed, in the automobile.

"... Bernay-sur-Mer will evermore live in the hearts of Frenchmen--you have given to France the immortal name of Jean Laparde."

Her hands, both of them now, were clasped tightly on his arm.

"Jean!" she whispered. "Jean!"

"_Mon Dieu_!"--the words came hoarsely from Jean's throat. They were cheering again. He moved, like iron impelled to the magnet, across the room. He looked at Myrna. He had never seen her eyes so bright.

"It is only the beginning, Jean"--she seemed half hysterical herself. "But in Paris, Jean--in Paris you shall see!"

They were at the door, and suddenly she flung it wide open. There was a roar of voices. She was smiling at him from the doorway. They were shouting his name. They rushed at him, and, lifting him shoulder high, carried him to the automobile. Fame--was this only a taste of it? No more than that? In Paris--what was it he should see in Paris? They were shouting again. It was like some fiery draught that his soul was drinking in. He craved it with a lust that was passionate, all-possessing. He cried out to those around him. He did not know what he said. And then Bidelot was speaking to him, and the automobile was whirling down the road, followed by the shouts of all Bernay-sur-Mer.

All Bernay-sur-Mer? No; not all. For as the car flashed by, halfway between the little bridge and the eastern headland, the fringe of bushes by the roadside parted, a dark head lifted, and Marie-Louise gazed after it. It was all so strange, and she could not quite understand. Once, twice before, on other evenings, she had watched the car pass. They were all of the great world those men with Jean in the car; of the great world of which she knew nothing, only that the village spoke of the strangers with awe. And now Jean was one of them--and they seemed so proud of him, so proud to make him one of themselves, these great men. And she was proud of him, too, oh, so proud and glad and happy--only back of it all was a little chill of dread and fear, and she could not quite understand. She had smiled at Jean from the edge of the crowd that was clustered around the door of the barn those days when he had been working at the clay--and then she had stolen away and cried so bitterly. She did not know why she had done that. If only some one would tell her what it all meant! Was it because Jean was going away for a little time? The dark eyes widened slowly. Was it only for a little time? She had not talked to Jean since that morning on the beach, and that was so long, long ago. It wasn't Jean's fault, though, nearly so much as hers. She had really tried to evade him. No, not to evade Jean; but to evade the others out of the shyness and diffidence for the great strangers who were now constantly around him. Would there be always these strangers around him?

She drew herself up suddenly, her small hands fiercely clenched. She hated these strangers! That was it! They were always coming between Jean and herself! They were always there! They made of Jean a different man; they made him one of themselves, and in doing that they were snatching him away from her, taking him across what seemed like some vast gulf that she could not traverse herself. She hated this Monsieur American, and this mademoiselle; and she hated the day they had come, for it had all begun that day. The red burned angrily in her cheeks, the lithe form quivered in a quick rush of passion--and then, instantly penitent, with a little sob, she flung herself down upon the grass.

No; she did not hate them! What had she said! The _bon Dieu_ would be very angry with her for that. And they had been very kind and good to her, this monsieur and this mademoiselle. And to hate all the others was to commit a sin, for were they not there because Jean--she raised her head quickly, parting the bushes again, as she caught the sound of steps and voices from the road.

It was Monsieur Bliss speaking in French to Father Anton, who walked between Monsieur Bliss and mademoiselle.

"Why should he not work here? Why should he go to Paris? What a question, my dear Monsieur le Cure! It is because here is nothing; because in Paris there is everything. It is there that he will study the great works of famous sculptors; it is there that he will have models and facilities for his work; it is there that he will have inspiration from the art around him; it is there that, with his genius, he will sift and choose, profiting from the different schools even as he creates a new one for himself; and it is there that the leading men of France will unite with the social world to make the name of Jean Laparde known and honoured wherever art is known."

"But," said Father Anton anxiously, "but he will come back--to Marie-Louise."

Henry Bliss's hand fell sympathetically upon the old priest's shoulder, as he shook his head.

"I do not know," he said soberly. "Who can tell? It depends upon Jean--and Marie-Louise. Frankly, I do not think he will come back, for there is always the danger that the greater he becomes the greater will become the distance between them--and Jean will unquestionably become a national figure. But it is a vastly different thing with him than it is with her. It is innate in him to take that place gracefully, even as his genius is innate in him. To her, I am afraid, it would be an impossible and an impracticable life. It is likely she would be miserable to begin with and feel herself a drag upon him, for, we must admit, she could not, as we say in America, hold up her end in his new life. It is one of those tragedies of life, isn't it, that we cannot shape one way or the other? It is something they alone must work out. It is not a little matter, this future of Jean's. France has claimed Jean, Monsieur le Cure, and it may well be, as Myrna here said a moment ago, there is no place in his new life for Marie-Louise. I--"

They had passed on.

It seemed to Marie-Louise that she was very cold, that somehow she could not move. There were three figures out there on the road walking along. It was very strange that so ordinary a thing as that should be taking place. She seemed to be numbed, to be waiting somehow for a return to consciousness. Was that consciousness that was returning now, was that it--this dull, monotonous pain? And that great choking in her heart--what was that? She was standing erect, and words were quivering on her lips.

"There is no place in his new life for Marie-Louise."

She was staring out before her; but the road, and, beyond it, the white beach, and, beyond that again, the blue of the sea with the great golden shaft of light from the setting sun upon it was gone--and there was only nothingness. Only her lips moved.

"There is no place--in his new life--for Marie-Louise."

-- X --

A DAUGHTER OF FRANCE

How still the house was! Only once during the night had Marie-Louise heard a sound as she had sat, dressed, by the window in the little attic room. And that sound had been the whir of an automobile rushing by on the road--it had been Jean returning from Marseilles. That was while it was very dark, very long ago--now it was daylight again, and the sun was streaming into the room.

The chaste, sweet face was tired and weary and aged a little; but on the lips, sensitive, delicate, making even more beautiful their contour, was a brave, resolute little smile, as her eyes rested on the small white bed, neatly made, unslept in. It was over now, the fight that had been so hard and so cruel to fight; and she needed only the courage to go on to the end.

Over and over again, all through the night, she had thought it out. She loved Jean. She loved Jean so much! She had trembled once when she had tried to think how much, and the thought had come so quickly, before she could arrest it, that she loved Jean as much as she loved God--and then she had prayed the _bon Dieu_ not to be angry with her for the sin, for she had not meant to think such thoughts as that.

It was true what they had said when they had passed by on the road yesterday evening. There was no place in his new life for her. A hundred little things all through the week had shown her that, only, until yesterday evening when Monsieur Bliss had spoken, she had not understood what they meant--Nanette, that first day, when Jean had come to lunch with mademoiselle and monsieur; the curious, side-long glances that the villagers gave her now; a strange, embarrassed reserve in Father Anton, when the good cure had spoken to her lately; that wide, vast gulf that lay between the world mademoiselle lived in, the world that Jean was going to, and her own world. They had all seen it--except herself. And she had not understood because she had not allowed herself to think what it might mean, what she knew now it meant--that she must lose Jean.

To let Jean go out of her life because France had claimed him--that was what her soul had whispered to her all through the night. A Daughter of France, her Uncle Gaston had called her proudly--it was Jean who had told her what her uncle had said--that he had taught her to love God and be never afraid. But she was afraid now, she had been afraid all through the night, for it seemed as if there were no more happiness, as though a great pain that would never go away again had come to her.

France had claimed Jean. He was to be a famous man. Did they not all talk of his glorious future? It was different with Jean--years ago even she had known that. She herself had told him he was different from the fishermen of Bernay-sur-Mer. Jean was born to the life that he was going to. Was he not even now taking his place amongst these great strangers as though he had been accustomed to do so always? And she, if she should try to do it, they would laugh at her, and she would bring ridicule upon Jean, and she could not do what Jean could do. She was a peasant girl whom mademoiselle scolded about going without shoes and stockings.

And Jean must surely have seen these things, too. But Jean, though he had heedlessly hurt her so when he had given away again the little beacon, would never speak to her of this, because this was a much greater thing which was to change all their lives. It was she who must speak to Jean, it was she who must tell him that she understood that the great future which lay before him must not be harmed; that she must not hold him back; that she must not stand in his way; that she would only hurt him in that dazzling, bewildering world that would disdain a fishergirl; that it was France, not she, who came first.

The night had brought her that. It was only the courage she needed now to act upon it.

She stood up, looking through the window--and the great dark eyes filled with a blinding mist.

"Jean! Jean!" she said brokenly aloud.

A little while she stood there, and then walked slowly across the room to the bed. And as once she had knelt there before, she dropped again upon her knees beside it. And now the smile came bravely again. They were wrong. It was not true. There was a place in his life for her--something that she could do now. There was one way in which her love could still help Jean in the wonderful life that had come to him.

The dark head bent to the coverlet.

"_Mon Pere_," she whispered, "make me that--Jean's beacon now."

And after a time she rose, and bathed her face, and fastened the black coils of hair that had become unloosed, and, as she heard Nanette stirring below, went quietly downstairs.

She must see Jean. They were going away to-day, mademoiselle and monsieur, and Nanette and Jules; and Jean was to follow them in a few days. She had heard mademoiselle and her father discussing it at their supper last evening. She must see Jean now before the others went, so--so that everybody would understand.

She stole out of the house, gained the road and started to run along it toward the village. Jean would be up long ago, all his life he had risen hours before this, and she would be back by the time mademoiselle and monsieur were up and needed her. She stopped suddenly, and in quick dismay glanced down at her bare feet. She had forgotten to put on her shoes and stockings. Suppose mademoiselle should see her returning like that!

And then Marie-Louise shook her head slowly, and went on again. It was not right to disobey, but it could not matter very much now, for mademoiselle was going away in the afternoon. And besides she could run much faster without them, and--the tears came with a rush to her eyes--they seemed all at once to mean so much, those shoes and stockings. It--it was the shoes and stockings and all they meant that was taking her out of Jean's life. She understood it all so well now.

She brushed the tears a little angrily from her eyes. She must not do that. To go to Jean and cry! Far better not to go at all! Afterwards, when they were gone, these Americans, and when Jean was gone, and she was alone and only the _bon Dieu_ to see, then perhaps the tears would be too strong for her. But now she must talk very bravely to Jean, and not make it harder for him; for, no matter what happened or what was to come, Jean, too, in his love, would feel the parting.

She understood Jean better now, too. The night had made so many things much clearer. Had he not confessed that he was not always happy as a fisherman in Bernay-sur-Mer? And must it not have been just this, this greatness within him, that had made him discontented? And now that it had come true, a far greater thing than he could have dreamed of, changing his whole life, must it not for the time have made him forget everything else? It had not killed his love for her, it had not done that--but this thing must be first before either of their loves. Afterwards, perhaps, it might kill his love--afterwards, yes, afterwards it might do that. She tried to smile a little. It was what she was going now to bring about--afterwards it _must_ kill his love. It was the only way. And that would come surely, very surely--his giving away of the beacon, so lightly forgetting what he told her it had meant, taught her that. If he went now, if she bade him go now, it was not for a little time--it was for always.

She was running, very fast, breathlessly--as though she were trying to outrun her thoughts. It was coming again, the same bitter fight that she had fought out through the darkness, through all those long hours alone--but she must not let it come, that sadness, that yearning that tried to make her falter and hold back. The way was very plain. If she loved Jean, if she really loved him, she must not let that love do anything but what would help him in his new, great life--she must cling to that. It would not be love if she did anything else; it would only mean that she loved herself more than she loved Jean.

"To be never afraid"--Uncle Gaston had taught her that, and the words were on her lips now--"To be never afraid."

She was walking again now, for she had reached the village. Some one called to her from a cottage door, and she called back cheerfully as she passed on to the Bas Rhone, where Papa Fregeau was standing in the doorway.

"_Tiens, petite_!" the fat little proprietor cried heartily. "But it is good to see our little Marie-Louise! You do not come often these days. They make you work too hard, those Americans, perhaps? But to-day they are going--eh? Wait, I will call Lucille."

"Good morning, Jacques," she answered. "Yes; it is to-day that they are going, so do not call Mother Fregeau, for there is a great deal to do at the house and I must hurry back."

"Ah!" observed Papa Fregeau. "You have come then with a message?"

"Yes," she said hurriedly; "for Jean. Do you know where he is?"

"But, _la, la_!" chuckled Papa Fregeau. "But, yes; he is upstairs in his room. But wait--I must tell you. I have just helped him carry it up. It is a very grand American affair, and he is like a child with it. It arrived from Marseilles last night after he had gone."

"What did?" inquired Marie-Louise patiently.

"What did!" ejaculated Papa Fregeau. "But did I not tell you? The American trunk, _pardieu_! that he is to go away with, and--" The fat little man grew suddenly confused. "_Tiens_!" he stammered. "He is upstairs in his room, Marie-Louise. I am an old fool--eh--an old fool!"--and he waddled away.

Why should it have hurt a little more because Jacques Fregeau had said Jean was going away? And why should Jacques Fregeau have been able to read it in her eyes? She was not so brave perhaps as she had thought. And her heart was pounding now very quickly and so hard that it brought pain, as she went up the stairs.

"_Mon Pere_"--her lips were whispering the same prayer over again--"make me that--Jean's beacon now."

And then she was knocking at the door.

For an instant she hesitated, as his voice called to her to enter; then she opened the door and stepped inside. It was Jean, this great fine figure of a man, who turned so quickly toward her; but it was already the Jean of the world where they wore shoes and stockings, and his clothes were like the clothes of Monsieur Bliss. They made him very handsome, very grand; only somehow they made it seem that her errand was useless now, that she had come too late, that Jean was already gone.

Her eyes met his, smiled--and, from his face, strayed about the room. It was very fine that American trunk, but not very large. It was like one that mademoiselle had, that she called a steamer trunk, and carried on the automobile--and the trunk was empty, and the tray was on the floor beside it.

"Marie-Louise!" he cried--and then, a little awkwardly, he caught her hands. "But--but what has brought you here, Marie-Louise?"

"To see you, Jean," she told him simply.

For a moment he stared at her uneasily. Was this then to be the scene that he had dreaded, that he had been putting off? And then he laughed a little unnaturally.

"Ah, did you think, then, Marie-Louise, that I had forgotten you? You must not think that! Only, _mon Dieu_, what with Bidelot, and the critics, and Marseilles, and the work all day at the new design, what could I do? But Bidelot and the rest have returned to Paris, and mademoiselle and monsieur go to-day; and this afternoon I was going to find you and tell you about the great plans they have all made for me."

"Yes; I know, Jean," she answered. "And that is what I have come for--to have a little talk about you and me."

"About my going away, you mean?" he said, infusing a lightness into his voice. "But you must not feel sad about that, Marie-Louise. You would not have me lose a chance like that! And it is only for a little while, until I have learned what, they say, Paris will teach me. I shall do great things in Paris, Marie-Louise--and then I shall come back."

She shook her head slowly.

"Jean," she said very quietly, "it is about your coming back that I want to speak to you. I have thought it all out last night. It is not for a little while. When you go it is for always. You can never come back."

"Never come back! Ah, is it that then that is troubling you?" he said eagerly. "You mean that you would not mind my going for a little while, only you think it is for more than that?"

"You do not understand, Jean"--it seemed as though she must cry out in wild abandon, as though the tears must come and fill her eyes, as though she were not brave at all. Would not the _bon Dieu_ help her now! She drew her hands away from him, and turned from him for an instant. "You can never come back, Jean; you can never come back to the old life. You will go on and on, further and further away from it, making a great name for yourself, and your friends will be all like the _grand monde_ who have been here, and I know that I cannot go into that life, too--I understand that all so well. And--and so, Jean, I have come to tell you that you are free."

"Free!" he cried--and gazed at her in stupefaction. The colour came and went from his face. He had not thought of this from her! And yet it was what he had said in his soul--if only there were nothing between Marie-Louise and himself! It was as if a weight had been lifted from him--only replacing the weight was a miserable pricking of conscience. "Free! What are you saying?"

And now the dark eyes were bright and deep and unfaltering--and suddenly she drew her form erect, and her head was thrown proudly back.

"Free, Jean, because you must not think any more of me; because you are to be a great man in your country and it is your duty to go, for France has called you, and France is first; because"--her voice, quivering, yet triumphant, was ringing through the room--"because I give you to France, Jean! You do not belong to me now--you belong to France!"

For a moment he did not speak. There seemed a thousand emotions, soul-born, surging upon him. Her words thrilled him; it was over; there was relief; it was done. She had gone where he had not dared to go in his thoughts--to the end. He would never come back, she said. He was free. But he could not have her think that he could let her go like that!

"No, no, Marie-Louise!" he burst out. "Do you think that even if I belonged to France, even if all my life were changed, that I could ever forget you, that I could forget Bernay-sur-Mer, and all the people and my life here?"

"Yes," she said, "you will forget."

"Never!" he asserted fiercely.

"Jean"--her voice was low again--"it is the _bon Dieu_ last night who has made me understand. I do not know what is in the new world that you are going to, only that you will be one of the greatest and perhaps one of the richest men in France. And I understand you better, Jean, I think, than you understand yourself. This fame and power will mean more to you than anything else, and it will grow and grow and grow, Jean. And, oh, Jean, I am afraid you will forget that it is not you at all who does these great things but that it is the _bon Dieu_ who lets you do them, and that you will grow proud, Jean, and lose all the best out of your life because you will even forget that once those clothes hanging there"--she pointed toward the rough fisherman's suit--"were yours."

It was strange to hear Marie-Louise talking so! He did not entirely understand. Something was bewildering him. She was telling him that he must think no more of her, that it was finished. And there was no scene. And she did not reproach him. And there were no tears. And it did not seem as though it were quite real. He had pictured quite another kind of scene, where there would be passion and angry words. And there was nothing of that--only Marie-Louise, like a grown-up Marie-Louise, like a mother almost, speaking so gravely and anxiously to him of things one would not expect Marie-Louise to know anything about.

She turned from him impulsively; and from the peg took down the cap and the rough suit, and from the floor gathered up the heavy boots with the coarse socks tucked into their tops--and, as he watched her in amazement, she thrust them suddenly into his arms.

"Promise me, Jean," she said in the same low way, "that you will keep these with you always, and that sometimes in your great world you will look at them and remember--that they, too, belong to France"--and then suddenly her voice broke, and she had run from the room.

She was gone. Jean's eyes, from the doorway, shifted to the clothes that cluttered up his arms--and for a long time he did not move. Then one hand lifted slowly, and in a dazed sort of way brushed the hair back from his eyes. It was a strange thing, that--to take these things with him to remember--what was it she had said?--to remember that they, too, belonged to France.

"_Mon Dieu_!" he whispered--and, with a queer lift of his shoulders, turned mechanically to the trunk beside him. "_Mon Dieu_!" he whispered again--and now there was a twisted little smile of pain upon his lips as understanding came, and almost reverently he laid the things in the bottom of the trunk.

-- XI --

THE PENDULUM

How many miles had they come? Jean did not know. It had been far--but far along a road of golden dreams, where time and distance mattered only because they were so quickly passed.

It was Myrna Bliss who had suggested it because, had she not said? she wanted to have a little talk with him alone before she left for Paris that afternoon--and they would walk out along the road before her father started, and the automobile would pick her up on the way.

And so they had come, and so she had talked and he had listened--feasting his eyes upon the superb, alluring figure that swung, so splendidly supreme, along beside him. She had told him of Paris--Paris, the City Beautiful--of the great city that was the glory of France, of its magnificent boulevards, its statues, its arches, its wonderful architecture, its wealth of art garnered from the ages, its happy mirth, its gaiety, its richness and its life, the life that would now be his. And he had listened, rapt, absorbed, fascinated, as though to some entrancing melody, now martial, now in softer strain, that stirred his pulse as it carried him beyond himself, and unfettered his imagination until it swept, free as a bird in air, into the land of dreams, that knew a fierce, ecstatic echo in his soul--the melody of her voice.

But now there had come a jarring note into that melody; and a sudden, swift emotion, that mingled dismay, a passionate longing, a panic sense of impotency, was upon him. The quick throb of the motor was sounding from down the road behind them. Monsieur Bliss was coming now. In a moment she would be gone.

She had heard it, too, for she ceased speaking abruptly, and, halting, turned to face him.

"Isn't it too bad, Jean?" she cried disappointedly. "And I had hardly begun to tell you about it! But then, never mind, the rest of it all you will see for yourself in a few more days, when you get to Paris."

In a moment she would be gone! What was it that held him back--that had always held him back before? He was strong enough--strong enough to crush her to him, to cover that gloriously beautiful face with his kisses, to bathe his face in the fragrance of her hair, to feel her heart, the throb, the pulse, the life of her body against his own! What was it that, strong as he was, was stronger than he?

"It--it is good-bye," he said, in a low, tense way.

She felt the passion that was possessing him--he read it in the startled glance of the grey eyes before they were veiled; in the ivory of the perfect throat grown colourful with the mounting red; in the parted lips before the teasing, merry smile was forced there, as she stepped back a little away from him. She knew! She knew, as he knew, that his soul was aflame--and it was she, not he, who dammed back the tide of his passion with that "something" that was so powerful an ally of hers, so readily, so always at her instant command. She knew, as he knew, that his soul was aflame--and yet she had not repulsed him. What did it mean? That she _cared_! But why did she laugh so lightly now, why was she so perfectly self-possessed? What did it mean? That she was playing with him!

"How absurd, Jean!" she laughed gaily. "Of course, it isn't 'good-bye'; that is"--she glanced at him demurely--"that is, unless you've changed your mind about coming to Paris." Then, impulsively eager: "But you haven't done that, have you? And you want to come more than ever now after what I have told you, don't you? And, Jean"--she came suddenly close to him again, and her face, its demureness gone, was puckered up in very earnest little wrinkles--"there isn't anything, you won't let anything keep you from coming--will you?"

Keep him from Paris--from her! Why had she asked that? He laughed out boisterously, harshly. It was very near now, that accursed automobile! Monsieur Bliss was calling out to them. Keep him from--Paris! He could only laugh out again wildly, as he looked at her.

"Jean!"--it was a quick, hurried exclamation, not all composure now, and her eyes were hidden, and her face was turned away. "Jean, good gracious, don't you hear father calling to you? Look, here he is!"

Jean swept his hand across his eyes. It was the madness upon him. Yes, here was Monsieur Bliss beside him, and she and her father were both talking at once. It was Paris! Always Paris that they talked of! In a week, in ten days, he would be there. And then they had both shaken hands with him, the grey eyes had smiled into his for an instant, and she had sprung from him into the automobile. It was a daze. They had gone. He was standing in the road watching them. She was fluttering a scarf at him, as she leaned far over the back of the car--her voice, full-throated, was throbbing in his ears.

"_An revoir_, Jean! _Au revoir_--till Paris!"

The car disappeared over the brow of a little hill, came into sight again as it topped the opposite rise, became a blur and then a tiny dot, scarcely discernible, far on along the road. And still he stood there.

It was gone at last. He turned then, and started back along the road toward Bernay-sur-Mer; now walking slowly, now suddenly changing his pace to a quick, impulsive stride. His eyes were on the road before him, but he saw nothing. Her voice was ringing in his ears again, and again he was living in that golden land of dreams--with her.

Paris! The City Beautiful! Paris--where he should know fame and power, where his genius should kindle a flame of enthusiasm that would spread throughout all France! Paris--where men should do him honour! Paris--where riches were! Paris--where she was!

His brain reeled with it. It was not wild imagining. A power, a mighty power, the power that made him master of his art lived and breathed in every fibre of his being. He needed no tongue of others now to tell him that this power was his; the knowledge of it was in his soul until he knew, knew as he knew that he had being and existence, that the work of Jean Laparde would stand magnificent and supreme before the eyes of the world. He saw himself the centre, the leader of a glittering entourage. Fame! Men of the highest ranks should envy him--the gamins of Paris should know his name. He threw back his head on his great shoulders. Conceit, all this? No; it was stupendous--but it was not conceit. He knew--his soul knew it. He was more sure of himself now than even those great critics of France had been sure. They had seen nothing--he had not begun. A year, two years in Paris, the tools to work with, the models of flesh and blood at his command--and, ah, God, what would he not do! They should see, they should see then! And they should stand and wonder, as they had not wondered before--at Jean Laparde!

He laughed suddenly aloud. Father Anton had preached a sermon once in the little church, he remembered it now--that fame was an empty thing. An empty thing! He laughed again. It was the simplicity of the good cure, who believed such things because, _pardieu_! the cure was a gentle soul and knew no better. What should Father Anton, who never went anywhere, into whose life came nothing but the little daily affairs of the fisherfolk in Bernay-sur-Mer, who could never have had any experience in the things outside the life of the village that turned everlastingly like a wheel in its grooves, know of fame? It was not the fault of Father Anton that he talked so, for he got those things out of his books, and, having no reason out of his own knowledge of life to know any better, believed them!

Jean shrugged his shoulders. One felt sorry for Father Anton! Perhaps once in two years the cure journeyed as far as Marseilles--and the few miles was a great event! What could one expect Father Anton to discover for himself out of life?

Fame--an empty thing! Poor Father Anton, who, because he believed it, so earnestly preached it to Papa Fregeau and Pierre Lachance who never went even as far as Marseilles, and who therefore in turn were very content to believe it, too! An empty thing? It was _everything_!

He drew in his breath sharply; his hand was feverishly tossing back the hair from his forehead. It was everything! It was wealth, it was power, it was might, it was greatness. It was real; it brought things to the very senses one possessed, things that one could see and hear and touch and taste and smell. They were real--real, those things! It brought money that bought all things; it brought position, honour and command, a name amongst the great names of France; it thrilled the soul and fired the blood; it was limitless, boundless, without horizon. It brought all things beyond the dreams that one could dream, the plaudits of his fellow-men, the wild-flung shouts of acclamation from hoarse-throated multitudes; it brought riches; it brought affluence; and it brought--love.

Love! Ay, it would bring love! It would bring him that more than it would bring him any other thing. He knew now what had held him back from crushing that maddeningly alluring form in his arms, from giving free rein to the passion that was his, from giving him the mastery of her. It was that same thing that Marie-Louise sensed between herself and what she called the _grand monde_. He, too, had not yet bridged the gulf. He had not yet been able to look into those grey eyes of the beautiful American and forget, deep in his soul, that she was different, that he had been Jean Laparde the poor fisherman and not always Jean Laparde the great sculptor. Was she playing with him? What did it matter? The day would come when she would not _play_! She would be his--and this fame, that was so empty a thing, would give her to him. If for no other thing than that he would go to Paris. She would be his--as all the world would be his! His! That is what fame would bring him! Would she play with him then in his greatness!

Paris! Paris! It lay before him, a glittering, entrancing vista; it held out its arms to him, and beckoned him; it heaped honour and glory and riches upon him; it gave him---her!

His hands were clenched at his sides, and the skin over the knuckles, tight-drawn, showed white; his stride was rapid, fierce; he was breathing quickly; his face was flushed; his eyes were burning. Paris, his art that would bring him fame, the fame that would bring him her--nor heaven nor hell would hold him back!

And then suddenly in the middle of the road he stopped, and his hand tore at his collar as though it choked him. Subconsciously he had seen stretching out before him the sparkling blue of the quiet sea, the headland, the little strip of beach where he and Gaston used to keep the boats, a blur of white where the house on the bluff showed through the trees--he had come that far on his way back. Subconsciously, in a meaningless way, he had seen this; but now it was blotted from him in a flash, and in its place came a scene that, though imaginary, was vivid, real, actual, where before reality itself had meant nothing.

It was black, intensely black, and the wild howling of the wind was in his ears. The rain was lashing at his face, and all along the beach echoed the terrific boom and roar of the surf. And now there came the crash of thunder, and quick upon its heels the heavens opening in darting, zigzag tongue-flames, lurid, magnificent, awesome, as the lightning flashes leapt across the sky. And he was standing on that little strip of beach, and far out across the waters, shrouded in a white smother of spume and spray, the figure of Marie-Louise stood outlined on the edge of the Perigeau Reef. And now he was crossing that stretch between them, and living again the physical agony that had been his; and now he was in the water, clinging to the gunwale of the boat, and in all the wild abandon of the storm her lips and his were pressed together in that long kiss that seemed to span all life and all eternity.

As though spellbound, a whiteness creeping into his face, Jean stood tense and motionless there in the road. Why had this come now--he had never let it come in the week that was past. Why should it have come now, like floodgates opened against his will, to overwhelm him? Ah, was it that? That little figure, that was just discernible, far off on that beach, the little figure, bare-footed, that was sitting now on the stem of his boat where it was drawn up on the sand, and whose face was cupped in her hands, and who seemed to be staring so intently out toward the Perigeau Reef! That was Marie-Louise there--Marie-Louise. Was it the sight of her that had brought this thing upon him? And now the scene was changed again. And it was against the window panes that the rain lashed, and against the sashes that the wind tore, and the lamp threw its light on the grey-grim face of old Gaston Bernier on the bed.

Jean shivered a little. What was coming now? What was that? Gaston's hand was upon his. He could hear Gaston's voice: "Jean, do you love Marie-Louise?" And then Gaston was repeating the question, and repeating it again: "Jean, do you love Marie-Louise?" And the old rugged strength seemed back again in Gaston Bernier, as he, rose up in bed, and his voice in a strange, stern note rang through the room: "Swear it, Jean ... to a dying man and in God's presence ... swear that you will..."

"God! My God!" Jean cried out aloud--and like a blind man feeling before him, turned from the road, stumbled a little way through the fields, and flung himself face down upon the grass.

There was torment and dismay upon him. His mind was in riot; his soul bare and naked now before him. Paris! No; he must go instead to Marie-Louise and tell her that he would stay in Bernay-sur-Mer, that they would live their lives together, because they loved each other. Yes; he loved Marie-Louise, not with the mad passion he had for this American who bewitched him, but as he had loved her all the years since they were children. He had told Gaston that, and it was true. It was the act of a _miserable_ to go away! No; he would not go now. It was true, all that he had told Marie-Louise, that she should stand on the beach and hold out her arms to him in welcome when he pulled ashore from the fishing, and that they would be always happy together. And yet--and yet had not Marie-Louise herself said that he belonged to France, and said herself that he must go for the great career that lay before him, for the great work that he was to do?

He cried out aloud sharply, as though in hurt--and prone upon his face, his hands outstretched before him, lay still for a little time.

It seemed to come insidiously, calling to him, luring him, wrestling, fighting, battling with the soul of him--Paris! Here there was love, but there, too, was love. One was calm; the other like the wild tumult of the storm that in its might, primal, elemental, swept him blindly forward. Paris--she would be there, she who held him in a spell, who made him forget Marie-Louise. And there was fame and glory there, honour and wealth--all, all, everything that the world could give. And it was his, all his--he had only to reach out and take it. There, all France would be at his feet. It made his brain swim with the mad intoxication of it. It was as a man dying with thirst who sees afar the water that is life to him. Here, he could never be contented now, he could never be happy, and in a year, two years, Marie-Louise, therefore, would be unhappy, too. But--but he could not go ... that night that he had held Gaston Bernier's hand ... and there was Marie-Louise that he loved ... Marie-Louise with the pure, fearless face, the great eyes that were full of a world of things, of calm, of trust, of tenderness and love, the lips, the wonderful lips that were so divinely carved, the lips like which there were no others. And he must choose now forever between Marie-Louise and--Paris. If he went, he would never come back. He was honest with himself now. He knew that. Marie-Louise knew that. He must choose now. Choose! Had he not already decided that he would--that he would--_what_?

It began all over again, and after that again for a hundred times, until the brain of the man was sick and weary, and the torment of it had brought the moisture to his forehead and into his eyes a fevered, hunted look--and still he lay there, and the hours went by. And after a time, beneath the rim of the sea in the west, the sun sank down, and the golden afterglow, soft and rich and warm, was as a gentle, parting benediction upon the earth--and Jean's head was buried in his outflung arms. And twilight came--and after that the evening--then darkness, and the myriad, twinkling stars of a night, calm and serene, were overhead--and it grew late.

And there came a soul-wrung cry from Jean, as he lifted a worn and haggard face to the moonlight.

"What shall I do? What shall I do?"