While they were looking at each other, waiting for breeze or undercurrent to move one vessel faster than the other and separate them, a general palaver began.  Leaning over the side, but holding each other off at a respectable distance with their long wooden props, like besieged pikemen repelling an assault, they began to chat about home, the last letters received, and sweethearts and wives.

“I say! my old woman,” said Kerjegou, “tells me she’s had the little boy we were looking for; that makes half-score-two now!”

Another had found himself the father of twins; and a third announced the marriage of pretty Jenny Caroff, a girl well known to all the Icelanders, with some rich and infirm old resident of the Commune of Plourivo.  As they were eyeing each other as if through white gauze, this also appeared to alter the sound of the voices, which came as if muffled and from far away.

Meanwhile Yann could not take his eyes off one of those brother fishermen, a little grizzled fellow, whom he was quite sure he never had seen before, but who had, nevertheless, straightway said to him, “How d’o, long Yann?” with all the familiarity of bosom acquaintance.  He wore the provoking ugliness of a monkey, with an apish twinkling of mischief too in his piercing eyes.

“As for me,” said Larvoer, of the Reine-Berthe, “I’ve been told of the death of the grandson of old Yvonne Moan, of Ploubazlanec—­who was serving his time in the navy, you know, in the Chinese squadron—­a very great pity.”

On hearing this, all the men of La Marie turned towards Yann to learn if he already knew anything of the sad news.

“Ay,” he answered in a low voice, but with an indifferent and haughty air, “it was told me in the last letter my father sent me.”  They still kept on looking at him, curious at finding out the secret of his grief, and it made him angry.

These questions and answers were rapidly exchanged through the pallid mists, so the moments of this peculiar colloquy skipped swiftly by.

“My wife wrote me at the same time,” continued Larvoer, “that Monsieur Mevel’s daughter has left the town to live at Ploubazlanec and take care of her old grand-aunt—­Granny Moan.  She goes out to needlework by the day now—­to earn her living.  Anyhow, I always thought, I did, that she was a good, brave girl, in spite of her fine-lady airs and her furbelows.”

Then again they all stared at Yann, which made him still more angry; a red flush mounted to his cheeks, under their tawny tan.

With Larvoer’s expression of opinion about Gaud ended this parley with the crew of the Reine-Berthe, none of whom were ever again to be seen by human eyes.  For a moment their faces became more dim, their vessel being already farther away; and then, all at once, the men of the Marie found they had nothing to push against, nothing at the end of their poles—­all spars, oars, odds and ends of deck-lumber, were groping and quivering in emptiness, till they fell heavily, one after the other, down into the sea, like their own arms, lopped off and inert.