I looked at her, wondering for a moment what she could have to think of, but, with an intelligible gesture of welcome, she beckoned me into my own room.  The aspect of it was somewhat dreary; the walls were of bare plaster, but dazzlingly white, with one little black silhouette of a woman’s head hanging in a common black frame over the low, open hearth, on which a fire of seaweed was smouldering, with a quantity of gray ashes round the small centre of smoking embers.  There was a little round table, uncovered, but as white as snow, and two chairs, one of them an arm-chair, and furnished with cushions.  A four-post bedstead, with curtains of blue and white check, occupied the larger portion of the floor.

It was not a luxurious apartment; and for an instant I could hardly realize the fact that it was to be my home for an indefinite period.  Some efforts had evidently been made to give it a look of welcome, homely as it was.  A pretty china tea cup and saucer, with a plate or two to match, were set out on the deal table, and the cushioned arm-chair had been drawn forward to the hearth.  I sat down in it, and buried my face in my hands, thinking, till Tardif knocked at the door, and carried in my trunk.

“Will it do, mam’zelle?” he asked, “will it do?”

“It will do very nicely, Tardif,” I answered; “but how ever am I to talk to your mother if she does not know English?”

“Mam’zelle,” he said, as he uncorded my trunk, “you must order me as you would a servant.  Through the winter I shall always be at hand; and you will soon be used to us and our ways, and we shall be used to you and your ways.  I will do my best for you, mam’zelle; trust me, I will study to do my best, and make you very happy here.  I will be ready to take you away whenever you desire to go.  Look upon me as your hired servant.”

He waited upon me all the evening, but with a quick attention to my wants, which I had never met with in any hired servant.  It was not unfamiliar to me, for in my own country I had often been served only by men; and especially during my girlhood, when I had lived far away in the country, upon my father’s sheep-walk.  I knew it was Tardif who fried the fish which came in with my tea; and, when the night closed in, it was he who trimmed the oil-lamp and brought it in, and drew the check curtains across the low casement, as if there were prying eyes to see me on the opposite bank.  Then a deep, deep stillness crept over the solitary place—­a stillness strangely deeper than that even of the daytime.  The wail of the sea-gulls died away, and the few busy cries of the farm-yard ceased; the only sound that broke the silence was a muffled, hollow boom which came up the ravine from the sea.

Before nine o’clock Tardif and his mother had gone up-stairs to their rooms in the thatch; and I lay wearied but sleepless in my bed, listening to these dull, faint, ceaseless murmurs, as a child listens to the sound of the sea in a shell.  Was it possible that it was I, myself, the Olivia who had been so loved and cherished in her girlhood, and so hated and tortured in later years, who was come to live under a fisherman’s roof, in an island, the name of which I barely knew four days ago?