When she arrived at the doctor’s gate, and dismounted to pull the great iron bell-rope that hung outside, she was trembling violently, and could hardly steady her hands to tie up the horse.  Jeanne, the cook’s sister, took her into the kitchen, while some one fetched the doctor, and she was so anxious that her speech should seem plain to them, that for the few first moments, from sheer nervousness, she could not utter a word.  Then the doctor entered, a tall, well-built man, with stiff, iron-grey hair and imperial, and an expression of genial contentment with himself and the rest of the world.

“Mais, Mademoiselle Annette,” he exclaimed the moment he saw her, “What are you doing then?  You must return home and go to bed at once.  Why did you not send me word before, instead of putting it off till you got so ill?”

He did not wait for her to reply, believing her to be speechless as usual, but placed her in a chair and began to feel her pulse.  She was trying to speak all the time, but from excitement and a strange dizziness that had come over her, she could not at once use her new faculty.  At last she got out the words, that it was not for herself she had come; that a fermier who had ridden fast from the village of St. Jean, further up the coast, to bring the news of the false light on the Geant, had been thrown from his horse—­but before she had finished the sentence, the doctor, still absorbed in the contemplation of her own case, interrupted her, exclaiming with astonishment at her new power of speech, and demanding to know by what means it had come, and how long she had possessed it.

But to recall the experience of that moment on the hill, when at the thought of the danger menacing the fishing boats, her tongue had been loosened, and the unaccustomed words had come forth, was too much for Annette.  She trembled so, and made such painful efforts to speak, that it seemed as though she were again losing the power of utterance; and the doctor bade her remain perfectly quiet, gave her some soothing medicine, and directed a bed to be prepared for her in the kitchen, as he said she was not fit to return home that night:  then he himself took the old horse from the gate where he stood, and set off for the auberge with what haste he might.

For three or four minutes after he was gone, Annette remained motionless in her seat, wearing her patient, deprecatory expression, while her eyes rested on the window, without apparently seeing the lights and dimly outlined figures that were visible on the rade outside.  Then her glance seemed to concentrate itself on something:  the nervous, trembling lips closed rigidly, and before they saw what she was about to do, she had risen from her chair, and darted from the room and out into the night.

“Our Lady guard her!  It was the boats she caught sight of,” said Victorine, the cook.  “There are the lights off the bay.  Go, stop her, Jeanne!  Monsieur will be angry with us if anything befall her.”