“You think so?  Then you shall learn what I have to do.  You think you are going to meet her at the cross at six o’clock.  But you will not, you will meet her sooner than that.  It was I that sent you that message, and I have advanced the time by half an hour.  Am I not kind?”

Antoine’s hand was on his collar like an iron vice.

“What have you done with her?  Where is she?”

Geoffroi writhed himself free with movements lithe like those of a panther.  “Will you take back the lie,” he said, “or will you see the proof with your own eyes?”

He was turning with a mocking sign to Antoine to follow, when from the left of the rock beside which they stood, there darted forward the white-coiffed figure of a girl, who with extended arms and agonized face, rushed up to Geoffroi, crying, “Take me away—­I have seen Them!  Take me away.”

She clung to Geoffroi’s arm, and screamed when Antoine would have touched her.  Antoine stood for a moment as if turned to stone.  Marie seemed half fainting and clung hysterically to Geoffroi, apparently hardly conscious of what she was doing.  Geoffroi took her in his arms and kissed her.  The act was so loathsome in its deliberate effrontery, that Antoine felt as if he was merely crushing a serpent when he struck him to the ground and tore Marie from his hold.  But he was dealing with something which he did not understand for Marie, finding herself in his grasp, opened her eyes on his face with a look of speechless terror, and breaking from him, fled down the ravine, springing from rock to rock with the security of recklessness.

Antoine followed her, stumbling through the darkness, but his speed was no match for the madness of fear, and his steps were still to be heard crashing through the furze bushes and loose stones, when the white coiffe had flitted, like some bird of night, round the projecting boulders of the sea-coast, and disappeared.

PART II.

Old Jeanne Le Gall was leaning on her stick in her solitary way beside the arched wellhead at the top of the lane, when she heard flying steps along the pathway of rock that bordered the sea, and peered through the twilight with her cunning old eyes, alert for something uncanny, or perchance out of which she could make some profit for herself.  Already that day, she had earned a sou by carrying a bit of a letter, and telling one or two little lies.  As the steps came nearer, a kind of moaning and sobbing was heard, and the old woman, muttering to herself—­“It is the voice of Marie.  What has the devil’s imp been doing to her?”—­hobbled as fast as she could to the turning that led to the sea, and just as the flying figure appeared, put out her skinny hand to arrest it.  There was a sudden scream, a fall, and Marie lay in the road, like one dead.

The cry brought to their doors, one after another, the occupants of the neighbouring cottages; and as the dark-shawled, free-stepping Breton women gathered round, for the clattering of sabots and of tongues, it might have been a group of black sea-fowl clamouring over some ‘trouvaille’ of the sea, thrown up among their rocks.