They came out when they saw the dumb girl listening:  for the keenness of the perceptions with which her fragile body was endowed, was well known among them, and was attributed to the direct agency of the unseen powers; with whom indeed she had been acknowledged from her birth to have closer relations than is the lot of ordinary mortals.  For there could be no doubt that Annette’s mother had received an intimation of some sort from the other world, the night before her child was born.  She had been found lying senseless in the moonlight on the hill-top, and had never spoken from that hour till her death a week afterwards.  As to what she had met or seen, there were various rumours:  some of the shrewder gossips declaring that it was nothing but old Marie Gourdon, the sorceress, who had frightened her by predicting in her mysterious wisdom, which not the shrewdest of them dared altogether disregard, that some strange calamity would attend the life of the child she was about to bring forth; a child that had indeed turned out speechless, and of so sickly a constitution that from year to year one hardly expected her to live.  Moreover, was it not the ill-omened figure of the old witch-woman, that had hobbled into the auberge with the news that Christine Leroux was lying like one dead by the roadside?  On the other hand, however, it was asserted with equal assurance, that she had seen in the moonlight, with her own eyes, the evil spirit of the dunes:  him of whom all travellers by night must beware; for it was his pleasure to delude them by showing lights as if of cottage windows on the waste land, where no cottage was:  while twice within living memory, he had kindled false fires on the great rock out at sea, which they called Le Geant, luring mariners to their death:  and woe betide the solitary wayfarer whose path he crossed!

Annette’s father knew what his wife had seen:  and one winter evening beside the peat-fire, as Annette was busy with her distaff, and he sat smoking and watching the glowing embers, he told her her mother’s story.  She and Paul’s father, the elder Paul Gignol, had been betrothed in their youth; but his fishing-smack had struck on the rocks one foggy night, and gone down, and with it all his worldly wealth.  And Christine’s father had broken off the match; for he had never been favourable to it, and how was Paul to keep her now with nothing to look to, but what might be picked up in the harbour?  And Paul was like one mad, and threatened to do her a bodily mischief, so that she was afraid to walk out at night by herself:  and her father offered him money to go away:  and he refused the money:  but he went off at last, hiring himself out on a cargo-boat, and declaring as he went, that one day yet, he would meet Christine in the way, and have his revenge.  And he was abroad for years, and wedded some English woman in one of the British sea-port towns, and at last was lost at sea on the very night on which Annette was born.