The driver clambered into his seat, clicked his tongue, and we went downhill.  The brake squeaked horribly from time to time.  At the foot he eased off the noisy mechanism and said, turning half round on his box—­

“We shall see some more of them by-and-by.”

“More idiots?  How many of them are there, then?” I asked.

“There’s four of them—­children of a farmer near Ploumar here. . . .  The parents are dead now,” he added, after a while.  “The grandmother lives on the farm.  In the daytime they knock about on this road, and they come home at dusk along with the cattle. . . .  It’s a good farm.”

We saw the other two:  a boy and a girl, as the driver said.  They were dressed exactly alike, in shapeless garments with petticoat-like skirts.  The imperfect thing that lived within them moved those beings to howl at us from the top of the bank, where they sprawled amongst the tough stalks of furze.  Their cropped black heads stuck out from the bright yellow wall of countless small blossoms.  The faces were purple with the strain of yelling; the voices sounded blank and cracked like a mechanical imitation of old people’s voices; and suddenly ceased when we turned into a lane.

I saw them many times in my wandering about the country.  They lived on that road, drifting along its length here and there, according to the inexplicable impulses of their monstrous darkness.  They were an offence to the sunshine, a reproach to empty heaven, a blight on the concentrated and purposeful vigour of the wild landscape.  In time the story of their parents shaped itself before me out of the listless answers to my questions, out of the indifferent words heard in wayside inns or on the very road those idiots haunted.  Some of it was told by an emaciated and sceptical old fellow with a tremendous whip, while we trudged together over the sands by the side of a two-wheeled cart loaded with dripping seaweed.  Then at other times other people confirmed and completed the story:  till it stood at last before me, a tale formidable and simple, as they always are, those disclosures of obscure trials endured by ignorant hearts.

When he returned from his military service Jean-Pierre Bacadou found the old people very much aged.  He remarked with pain that the work of the farm was not satisfactorily done.  The father had not the energy of old days.  The hands did not feel over them the eye of the master.  Jean-Pierre noted with sorrow that the heap of manure in the courtyard before the only entrance to the house was not so large as it should have been.  The fences were out of repair, and the cattle suffered from neglect.  At home the mother was practically bedridden, and the girls chattered loudly in the big kitchen, unrebuked, from morning to night.  He said to himself:  “We must change all this.”  He talked the matter over with his father one evening when the rays of the setting sun entering the yard between the outhouses ruled the heavy shadows with luminous