The ambitious child—­a girl of fourteen—­at this moment came down stairs, and a more forbidding young damsel we had seldom seen.  Her mother had evidently no control over her; she was mistress of the situation; ordered her mother about, slapped a younger brother, a little fellow who was playing at a table with some leaden soldiers, and finally, to our relief, disappeared into an inner room.  We saw her no more.

“It is always like that,” sighed the poor mother, who seemed by no means a woman to be lightly sat upon:  “always like that ever since she went that malheureux voyage to Paris.  It has changed her character; made her dissatisfied with her lot; I fear she will one day leave us and go back to Paris for good—­or rather for evil; for she will have no one to look after her; and, I am told, it is a sink of iniquity.  I was never there, and know very little about the ways of large towns.  Morlaix is quite enough for me.  But she is afraid of her father, that is one bonheur.”

All this time she had been brewing us coffee, and now she brought it to us in her best china, with some of the spirit of the country which does duty for cognac and robs so many of the Bretons of their health and senses.  But it was not a time to be fastidious.  To counteract the effects of the elements and drenched clothes, we helped ourselves liberally to a decoction that we thought excellent, but under other conditions should have considered poisonous.

The while our hostess, glad of an appreciative audience, poured into our ears tales and stories of herself, her life and the neighbourhood.  How she had originally belonged to the Morbihan, and when a girl dressed in the costume of her country, with the short petticoats and the picturesque kerchief crossed upon the breast.  How her father had been a well-to-do bazvalan and made the Sunday clothes for the whole village.  And how she had met her fate when her bonhomme came that way on a visit to an old uncle in the village, and in six months they were married, and she had come to Morlaix.  She had never regretted her marriage.  She had a good husband, who worked hard; and if they were poor, they were far from being in want.  She had really only one trouble in the world, and that was that she could do nothing with her eldest girl.  She would obey no one but her father; and even he was losing control over her.

“Is her father much away?” we asked, thinking that the young damsel looked as if she were under no very stern discipline.

“Not on long voyages, such as going to Paris or the Morbihan,” replied the woman; “but he is often away for half-a-day or so, selling his fish in Morlaix and doing commissions for their little auberge.  And then,” she added with a condoning smile, “of course he sometimes met with a camarade who enticed him to drink a glass too much, though that was a rare occurrence.  Mais que voulez-vous?  Human nature was weak; and for her part she really thought that men were weaker than women.  Certainly they were more self-indulgent.”