s that since his return he had been leading a most dissipated
life indeed. Three or four times, on the Ploubazlanec road, she had seen
him coming towards her, but she was always quick enough to shun him; and
he, too, in those cases, took the opposite direction over the heath. As
if by mutual understanding, now, they fled from each other.

CHAPTER XV--THE NEW SHIP

At Paimpol lives a large, stout woman named Madame Tressoleur. In one of
the streets that lead to the harbour she keeps a tavern, well known to
all the Icelanders, where captains and ship-owners come to engage
their sailors, and choose the strongest among them, men and masters all
drinking together.

At one time she had been beautiful, and was still jolly with the
fishers; she has a mustache, is as broad built as a Dutchman, and as
bold and ready of speech as a Levantine. There is a look of the daughter
of the regiment about her, notwithstanding her ample nun-like muslin
headgear; for all that, a religious halo of its sort floats around her,
for the simple reason that she is a Breton born.

The names of all the sailors of the country are written in her head as
in a register; she knows them all, good or bad, and knows exactly, too,
what they earn and what they are worth.

One January day, Gaud, who had been called in to make a dress, sat down
to work in a room behind the tap-room.

To go into the abode of our Madame Tressoleur, you enter by a broad,
massive-pillared door, which recedes in the olden style under the first
floor. When you go to open this door, there is always some obliging gust
of wind from the street that pushes it in, and the new-comers make an
abrupt entrance, as if carried in by a beach roller. The hall is adorned
by gilt frames, containing pictures of ships and wrecks. In an angle
a china statuette of the Virgin is placed on a bracket, between two
bunches of artificial flowers.

These olden walls must have listened to many powerful songs of sailors,
and witnessed many wild gay scenes, since the first far-off days of
Paimpol--all through the lively times of the privateers, up to these of
the present Icelanders, so very little different from their ancestors.
Many lives of men have been angled for and hooked there, on the oaken
tables, between two drunken bouts.

While she was sewing the dress, Gaud lent her ear to the conversation
going on about Iceland, behind the partition, between Madame Tressoleur
and two old sailors, drinking.