They tried their utmost to restore her consciousness, but with that ignorance of the simplest remedies which is sometimes found among the Breton peasants, they had so far failed:  and though someone had been sent to fetch back the doctor from the auberge, Victorine and the other women shook their heads, as Jules had done, and said to each other, “It is in vain; she will never waken more.”

But when the fainting fit had lasted nearly an hour, and in the wild eyes of Paul, who stood leaning on the foot of the bed, a gleam of fear was beginning to show itself; there was a stir in the lifeless form, a struggle of the breath, a flicker of the eyelids:  they opened, and a glance, in which all Annette’s pure and loving spirit seemed to shine forth, fell direct on Paul’s face at the end of the bed.  She smiled brightly, and said distinctly “Au revoir:”  then turned on her side, and died.

Jules and Paul, in their simple peasant fashion, went about seeing to what had to be done before morning; but Annette’s father spoke not a word.  Paul, to cheer him, told him of the wife he had wedded on the other side of the sea, and who would come home to be a daughter to him:  and Jules nodded silently, without betraying a shadow of surprise:  having art enough, in the midst of his grief, to keep Annette’s secret loyally.

Along the straight, white road there came, in the early dawn, a little silent procession:  the silent road, that was ever bringing tidings, good or evil, to the auberge:  though now no white-coiffed girl with a patient face was waiting at the door.  All the road was deserted, for the villagers were still asleep, as the little procession wound its way along:  wrapped in the same silence in which Annette’s own young life had been passed.  A cart with a plain coffin in it, was drawn by the old horse that had carried Annette to the harbour the night before, and who stepped as though he knew what burden he was bringing:  Paul led the horse; and beside the cart, with his head bowed on his breast, walked Annette’s father.

After the funeral rites were over, the smooth current of existence by the roadside and the harbour flowed on, apparently in complete oblivion of the fragile blossom of a girl’s life, that had appeared for a little while on its surface, and then been swept away for ever.

[Illustration:]

THE HALTING STEP.

CHAPTER I.

On the Western coast of one of the islands in the Channel group is a level reach of salt marshes, to which the sea rises only at the highest spring tides, and which at other times extends as far as the eye can see, a dreary waste of salt pools, low rocks, and stretches of sand, yielding its meagre product of shell-fish, samphire, and sea-weed to the patient toil of the fisher-folk that dwell in scattered huts along the shore.  One arm of the bay, at the time