And she smiled also, as she gazed at him full in the face; answering seldom, but listening with her whole soul, more and more astonished and more and more drawn towards him.  What a mixture of untamed roughness and caressing childishness he was!  His earnest voice, short and blunt towards others, became softer and more and more tender as he spoke to her; and for her alone he knew how to make it trill with extreme sweetness, like the music of a stringed instrument with the mute upon it.

What a singular and astonishing fact it was to see this man of brawn, with his free air and forbidding aspect, always treated by his family like a child, and deeming it quite natural; having travelled over all the earth, met with all sorts of adventures, incurred all dangers, and yet showing the same respectful and absolute obedience to his parents.

She compared him to others, two or three dandies in Paris, clerks, quill-drivers, or what not, who had pestered her with their attentions, for the sake of her money.  He seemed to be the best, as well as the most handsome, man she had ever met.

To put herself more on an equality with him she related how, in her own home, she had not always been so well-off as at present; that her father had begun life as a fisherman off Iceland, and always held the Icelanders in great esteem; and that she herself could clearly remember as a little child, having run barefooted upon the beach, after her poor mother’s death.

Oh! the exquisite night of that ball, unique in her life!  It seemed far away now, for it dated back to December, and May had already returned.  All the sturdy partners of that evening were out fishing yonder now, scattered over the far northern seas, in the clear pale sun, in intense loneliness, while the dust thickened silently on the land of Brittany.

Still Gaud remained at her window.  The market-place of Paimpol, hedged in on all sides by the old-fashioned houses, became sadder and sadder with the darkling; everywhere reigned silence.  Above the housetops the still brilliant space of the heavens seemed to grow more hollow, to raise itself up and finally separate itself from all terrestrial things:  these, in the last hour of day, were entirely blended into the single dark outline of the gables of olden roofs.

From time to time a window or door would be suddenly closed; some old sailor, shaky upon his legs, would blunder out of the tavern and plunge into the small dark streets; or girls passed by, returning home late after their walk and carrying nosegays of May-flowers.  One of them who knew Gaud, calling out good-evening to her, held up a branch of hawthorn high towards her as if to offer it her to smell; in the transparent darkness she could distinguish the airy tufts of its white blossoms.  From the gardens and courts floated another soft perfume, that of the flowering honeysuckle along the granite walls, mingled with a vague smell of seaweed in the harbour.