“Louise,” said Peter, “wilt thou forgive me?”

She looked up perplexed, only half believing what she heard.

“I know everything.  I have seen Jacques.  I was harsh to thee, mon enfant.”

“I meant no harm,” said Louise.  “I begged him not to come.  I knew thou wouldest be angered.”

“I am not angered.  He is thy husband.”

She glanced up with an irrepressible start of eagerness.

“Thou meanest—­” Her very desire seemed to take away her speech.

Peter laid his hand on her wrist, as gently as a woman.

“Louise,” he said, “thou lovest him?”

She gazed at him in silence; the piercing question in her eyes her only answer.

“Thou shalt go with him,” he said.  “I only came to say goodbye.”

He went to the door:  then stood and looked back, with a world of yearning and tenderness in his face.  He stretched out his arms.  “Kiss me, Louise,” he said.

She rose, still half frightened, and kissed him as she was told.

He held her tightly in his arms for a minute, then put her silently from him, and turned away.

Peter was not seen in those parts again.  It was understood that he and his wife had emigrated to New Zealand, and the cottage was sold, and the furniture and things dispersed.

In a fishing village on the coast of Brittany, there appeared, not long afterwards, a tall Englishman, speaking the Channel Island patois, who settled down to make a home among the Breton folk, adopting their ways and language, and eking out, like them, a livelihood by hard toil early and late among the rocks and sand-banks, or by long months of fishing on the high seas; a man on whom the simple-minded villagers looked with a certain respect, mingled with awe, as on one who seemed to them marked out by heaven for some special fate; who lived alone in his cottage, attending to his own wants, no woman being ever allowed to enter it; and about whose past nothing was known, and no one dared to ask.

[Illustration;]

TABITHA’S AUNT.

From the very hour that Tabitha set foot in my house, I conceived a dislike for her Aunt.  In the first place I did not see why she should have an Aunt.  Tabitha was going to belong to me:  and why an old, invalid lady, whose sons were scattered over the face of the earth, and who had never had a daughter of her own:  who had been clever enough to discover a distant relationship to Tabitha, and had promptly matured a plan by which Tabitha was to remain always with her; to take the vacant chair opposite and pour out tea, and be coddled and kissed and looked after—­why she might not have Tabitha herself for her whole and sole property, I could not understand.  But this Aunt was always turning up:  not visibly, I mean, but in conversation.  I could never say which way I liked Tabitha’s veil to be fastened but I