ng more and
more distinct; and waited for the rider to appear on the ridge of the
hill, which, some half mile off, raised its purple outline against the
western sky.

They came out when they saw the dumb girl listening: for the keenness of
the perceptions with which her fragile body was endowed, was well known
among them, and was attributed to the direct agency of the unseen
powers; with whom indeed she had been acknowledged from her birth to
have closer relations than is the lot of ordinary mortals. For there
could be no doubt that Annette's mother had received an intimation of
some sort from the other world, the night before her child was born. She
had been found lying senseless in the moonlight on the hill-top, and had
never spoken from that hour till her death a week afterwards. As to what
she had met or seen, there were various rumours: some of the shrewder
gossips declaring that it was nothing but old Marie Gourdon, the
sorceress, who had frightened her by predicting in her mysterious
wisdom, which not the shrewdest of them dared altogether disregard, that
some strange calamity would attend the life of the child she was about
to bring forth; a child that had indeed turned out speechless, and of so
sickly a constitution that from year to year one hardly expected her to
live. Moreover, was it not the ill-omened figure of the old witch-woman,
that had hobbled into the auberge with the news that Christine Leroux
was lying like one dead by the roadside? On the other hand, however, it
was asserted with equal assurance, that she had seen in the moonlight,
with her own eyes, the evil spirit of the dunes: him of whom all
travellers by night must beware; for it was his pleasure to delude them
by showing lights as if of cottage windows on the waste land, where no
cottage was: while twice within living memory, he had kindled false
fires on the great rock out at sea, which they called Le Geant, luring
mariners to their death: and woe betide the solitary wayfarer whose path
he crossed!

Annette's father knew what his wife had seen: and one winter evening
beside the peat-fire, as Annette was busy with her distaff, and he sat
smoking and watching the glowing embers, he told her her mother's story.
She and Paul's father, the elder Paul Gignol, had been betrothed in
their youth; but his fishing-smack had struck on the rocks one foggy
night, and gone down, and with it all his worldly wealth. And
Christine's father had broken off t