They raised her painfully, with kind but ungentle hands, wept and called on the saints, availing little in any way, till the heavy tramp of a fisherman’s nailed boots was heard on the rocks, and Antoine thrust the throng aside, and bending over, took her up in his arms, as a mother might her child, and without a word bore her along the road towards her home.

But he had scarcely placed her on the settle beside the bed, when her eyes opened, and as they rested on him, again the look of terror came into them:  she flung herself away from him with a scream, and sobbing and uttering strange sounds of fear and aversion, was hardly to be held by the other women.

“She has lost her wits!” they cried.  “Our Blessed Lady help her!”

White with fear themselves, and half believing it to be some supernatural visitation, they clung round her, supporting her till the fit had passed, and she lay back on the bed exhausted and half unconscious:  her fresh, young lips drawn with an unnatural expression of suffering, and her frank, blue eyes heavy and lifeless.  Antoine was turned out of the cottage, lest the sight of him should excite her again, and he marched away across the low rocks to his own home on the solitary foreland.  As he passed the chapel on the shore, he saw through the open door, a single taper burning before the shrine of St. Nicholas, and just serving to show the gloom and emptiness of the place; and it seemed to him as though the Saints had deserted it.

He never saw Marie again.  Once during her illness, the kind, clever old Aimee, wrung by the sight of her boy’s haggard face, as he went to and fro about the boats, without food or sleep, took her way to the Pierres’ cottage, with the present of a fine fresh “dorade” for the invalid; and when she had stood for a minute by the bedside leaning on her stick, and looking on the face of the half-unconscious girl, she began with her natty old hand to pat Marie’s shoulder, and with coaxing words to get her to say that she would see Antoine.  But at the first sound of the name, the limp figure started up from the pillows, and from the innocent, childish lips came a stream of strange, eager speech, as she poured forth her conviction, like a cherished secret, that Antoine was possessed of the Evil One:  for Jeanne, the sorceress, had told her so:  that he was one of Them, and by night in the valley you could see him in his own shape.  Then she grew more wild, crying out that Antoine would kill her:  that he had bewitched her, and she must die.

Anyone unaware of the hold which superstition has over the Breton mind, would perhaps hardly believe that the women stood round awe-struck at this revelation, seeing nothing improbable in it.  In spite of her dangerous state of excitement, they eagerly pressed her with questions as to what she had seen, and what Jeanne had said, but she had become too incoherent to satisfy them, and only flung herself wildly about, crying, “Let me go—­he will kill me—­let me go:”  till she suddenly sank down motionless on the pillow, was silent for a few moments, and then began to murmur over and over in an awe-struck, eager whisper, “Go to the Black Stone this night, and you shall see.  Go to the Black Stone this night, and you shall see.”