“And his spirit it was, Annette, that appeared to your mother in the road that night, the very hour that he died.  For it was borne in on me that he had met her in the way, as he had said, and I asked her, as she lay a-dying, if it was Paul that she had seen; and she looked at me with eyes that spoke as plain as the speech that she had lost:  and said that it was he.”

Jules was ordinarily a silent man:  he told the story slowly, with long pauses between the sentences:  and when he had once told it, he never spoke of it again.

Now Annette thought of many things in her quiet, clear-sighted way.  She knew that her mother had been found senseless at the foot of the menhir, which they called Jean of Kerdual, just beyond the crest of the hill:  and she had often noticed the shadow which the great, weird stone threw across the road, and thought how like it was (especially by moonlight) to the figure of a fisherman with his peaked cap and blouse.  She believed there was more in this than a chance resemblance; for to a Breton girl the supernatural world is very real:  and she had no doubt that the spirit of Paul’s father haunted the stone that was so like his bodily form, and that on the night when he was drowned, the dumb menhir had found voice, and had spoken to her mother in his name.  Annette always avoided Jean of Kerdual, if it was possible to do so, and would never let his shadow fall upon her.  She felt that the solemn, world-old stone was in some way hostile to her, and attributed her dumbness to its influence.

She often wished that she and her father did not live so near the stone.  It had come to be like a nightmare to her.  She would dream that it stood threateningly over her, enveloping her in its shadow:  that she was struggling to speak, and that it reached forth a hand, heavy as stone, and laid it on her mouth, stifling utterance.  Then the paralysis that had fettered her tongue from her birth, would creep over the rest of her senses and over all her limbs, till she lay motionless and helpless under the hand of the menhir, like a stone herself, only alive and conscious.  This dream had come more frequently since Paul had been away, and Annette would often look up and down the road—­that road which was her only link with the world beyond—­in the vague hope that it might one day bring her some deliverance.

And now, as she stood listening to the galloping hoofs, she had an odd feeling that Jean of Kerdual was threatening once more to render her powerless, but that this time he would not prevail:  for that something was coming along the road, nearer—­nearer—­with every gallop, to free her from him for ever.  Then suddenly the sounds changed:  the horseman was ascending the hill on the other side, and the galloping grew laboured and slower.  Would he never come into sight?  It seemed to Annette that she could bear it no longer:  she set off and ran along the road and up the hill, to meet the unseen rider.