"Chut! Chut!" said the voice of Victorine in the crowd. "It is but the
nerves. Did not you see she was striving to say the word of greeting,
and it was a cruel blow to find her speech had gone from her again.
Surely it is but a crisis of the nerves."

But Jules, bending his tangled beard over her, groaned "The hand of God
is heavy on me."

He and Paul raised her between them, and carried her to the doctor's,
stepping softly for fear of doing her a mischief: while the story of her
recovered speech, and the danger which had threatened the fleet, was
told to the returned fisherman in breathless, awe-struck accents. He
listened, full of wonder, and as he saw her safely tucked into her
box-bed in the doctor's kitchen, said in his light-hearted Celtic way,
that it was not for nothing she had got her voice back, and no fear but
she would soon be well, and would speak to him in the morning.

But her father, who sat watching her unconscious face, and holding her
hand in both his, as though he feared she would slip away from him,
shook his head and said, "She will not see another dawn."

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