“It’s Gaud, with long Yann from Pors-Even.  They were married only t’other day!”

This last day was really spring.  It was strange and wonderful to behold this universal serenity.  Not a single cloud marred the lately flecked sky.  The wind did not blow anywhere.  The sea had become quite tranquil, and was of a pale, even blue tint.  The sun shone with glaring white brilliancy, and the rough Breton land seemed bathed in its light, as in a rare, delicate ether; it seemed to brighten and revive even in the utmost distance.  The air had a delicious, balmy scent, as of summer itself, and seemed as if it were always going to remain so, and never know any more gloomy, thunderous days.  The capes and bays over which the changeful shadows of the clouds no longer passed, were outlined in strong steady lines in the sunlight, and appeared to rest also in the long-during calm.  All this made their loving festival sweeter and longer drawn out.  The early flowers already appeared:  primroses, and frail, scentless violets grew along the hedgerows.

When Gaud asked:  “How long then are you going to love me, Yann?”

He answered, surprisedly, looking at her full in the face with his frank eyes:  “Why, for ever, Gaud.”

That word, spoken so simply by his fierce lips, seemed to have its true sense of eternity.

She leaned on his arm.  In the enchantment of her realized dream, she pressed close to him, always anxious, feeling that he was as flighty as a wild sea-bird.  To-morrow he would take his soaring on the open sea.  And it was too late now, she could do nothing to stop him.

From the cliff-paths where they wandered, they could see the whole of this sea-bound country; which seems almost treeless, strewn with low, stunted bush and boulders.  Here and there fishers’ huts were scattered over the rocks, their high battered thatches made green by the cropping up of new mosses; and in the extreme distance, the sea, like a boundless transparency, stretched out in a never-ending horizon, which seemed to encircle everything.

She enjoyed telling him about all the wonderful things she had seen in Paris, but he was very contemptuous, and was not interested.

“It’s so far from the coast,” said he, “and there is so much land between, that it must be unhealthy.  So many houses and so many people, too, about!  There must be lots of ills and ails in those big towns; no, I shouldn’t like to live there, certain sure!”

She smiled, surprised to see this giant so simple a fellow.

Sometimes they came across hollows where trees grew and seemed to defy the winds.  There was no view here, only dead leaves scattered beneath their feet and chilly dampness; the narrow way, bordered on both sides by green reeds, seemed very dismal under the shadow of the branches; hemmed in by the walls of some dark, lonely hamlet, rotting with old age, and slumbering in this hollow.

A crucifix arose inevitably before them, among the dead branches, with its colossal image of Our Saviour in weather-worn wood, its features wrung with His endless agony.