True, she had been at first little Gaud (Daisy), paddling bare-footed in the water, motherless, almost wholly neglected during the season of the fisheries, which her father spent in Iceland; a pretty, untidy, obstinate girl, but growing vigorous and strong in the bracing sea-breeze.  In those days she had been sheltered, during the fine summers, by poor Granny Moan, who used to give her Sylvestre to mind during her days of hard work in Paimpol.  Gaud felt the adoration of a young mother for the child confided to her tender care.  She was his elder by about eighteen months.  He was as dark as she was fair, as obedient and caressing as she was hasty and capricious.  She well remembered that part of her life; neither wealth nor town life had altered it; and like a far-off dream of wild freedom it came back to her, or as the remembrance of an undefined and mysterious previous existence, where the sandy shores seemed longer, and the cliffs higher and nobler.

Towards the age of five or six, which seemed long ago to her, wealth had befallen her father, who began to buy and sell the cargoes of ships.  She had been taken to Saint-Brieuc, and later to Paris.  And from la petite Gaud she had become Mademoiselle Marguerite, tall and serious, with earnest eyes.  Always left to herself, in another kind of solitude than that of the Breton coast, she still retained the obstinate nature of her childhood.

Living in large towns, her dress had become more modified than herself.  Although she still wore the coiffe that Breton women discard so seldom, she had learned to dress herself in another way.

Every year she had returned to Brittany with her father—­in the summer only, like a fashionable, coming to bathe in the sea—­and lived again in the midst of old memories, delighted to hear herself called Gaud, rather curious to see the Icelanders of whom so much was said, who were never at home, and of whom, each year, some were missing; on all sides she heard the name of Iceland, which appeared to her as a distant insatiable abyss.  And there, now, was the man she loved!

One fine day she had returned to live in the midst of these fishers, through a whim of her father, who had wished to end his days there, and live like a landsman in the market-place of Paimpol.

The good old dame, poor but tidy, left Gaud with cordial thanks as soon as the letter had been read again and the envelope closed.  She lived rather far away, at the other end of Ploubazlanec, in a hamlet on the coast, in the same cottage where she first had seen the light of day, and where her sons and grandsons had been born.  In the town, as she passed along, she answered many friendly nods; she was one of the oldest inhabitants of the country, the last of a worthy and highly esteemed family.

With great care and good management she managed to appear pretty well dressed, although her gowns were much darned, and hardly held together.  She always wore the tiny brown Paimpol shawl, which was for best, and upon which the long muslin rolls of her white caps had fallen for past sixty years; her own marriage shawl, formerly blue, had been dyed for the wedding of her son Pierre, and since then worn only on Sundays, looked quite nice.