That day Madame Levaille had gone early in the afternoon to the house she had near Kervanion.  She had to pay some of the men who worked in her granite quarry there, and she went in good time because her little house contained a shop where the workmen could spend their wages without the trouble of going to town.  The house stood alone amongst rocks.  A lane of mud and stones ended at the door.  The sea-winds coming ashore on Stonecutter’s point, fresh from the fierce turmoil of the waves, howled violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders holding up steadily short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous rush of the invisible.  In the sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling stood in a calm resonant and disquieting, like the calm in the centre of a hurricane.  On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black pit, from which ascended mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.  At high tide the returning water assaulted the ledges of rock in short rushes, ending in bursts of livid light and columns of spray, that flew inland, stinging to death the grass of pastures.

The darkness came from the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the red fires of sunset, and went on to seaward pursuing the retiring tide.  The wind dropped with the sun, leaving a maddened sea and a devastated sky.  The heavens above the house seemed to be draped in black rags, held up here and there by pins of fire.  Madame Levaille, for this evening the servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them to depart.  “An old woman like me ought to be in bed at this late hour,” she good-humouredly repeated.  The quarrymen drank, asked for more.  They shouted over the table as if they had been talking across a field.  At one end four of them played cards, banging the wood with their hard knuckles, and swearing at every lead.  One sat with a lost gaze, humming a bar of some song, which he repeated endlessly.  Two others, in a corner, were quarrelling confidentially and fiercely over some woman, looking close into one another’s eyes as if they had wanted to tear them out, but speaking in whispers that promised violence and murder discreetly, in a venomous sibillation of subdued words.  The atmosphere in there was thick enough to slice with a knife.  Three candles burning about the long room glowed red and dull like sparks expiring in ashes.

The slight click of the iron latch was at that late hour as unexpected and startling as a thunder-clap.  Madame Levaille put down a bottle she held above a liqueur glass; the players turned their heads; the whispered quarrel ceased; only the singer, after darting a glance at the door, went on humming with a stolid face.  Susan appeared in the doorway, stepped in, flung the door to, and put her back against it, saying, half aloud—­

“Mother!”

Madame Levaille, taking up the bottle again, said calmly:  “Here you are, my girl.  What a state you are in!” The neck of the bottle rang on the rim of the glass, for the old woman was startled, and the idea that the farm had caught fire had entered her head.  She could think of no other cause for her daughter’s appearance.