he match; for he had never been
favourable to it, and how was Paul to keep her now with nothing to look
to, but what might be picked up in the harbour? And Paul was like one
mad, and threatened to do her a bodily mischief, so that she was afraid
to walk out at night by herself: and her father offered him money to go
away: and he refused the money: but he went off at last, hiring himself
out on a cargo-boat, and declaring as he went, that one day yet, he
would meet Christine in the way, and have his revenge. And he was abroad
for years, and wedded some English woman in one of the British sea-port
towns, and at last was lost at sea on the very night on which Annette
was born.

"And his spirit it was, Annette, that appeared to your mother in the
road that night, the very hour that he died. For it was borne in on me
that he had met her in the way, as he had said, and I asked her, as she
lay a-dying, if it was Paul that she had seen; and she looked at me with
eyes that spoke as plain as the speech that she had lost: and said that
it was he."

Jules was ordinarily a silent man: he told the story slowly, with long
pauses between the sentences: and when he had once told it, he never
spoke of it again.

Now Annette thought of many things in her quiet, clear-sighted way. She
knew that her mother had been found senseless at the foot of the menhir,
which they called Jean of Kerdual, just beyond the crest of the hill:
and she had often noticed the shadow which the great, weird stone threw
across the road, and thought how like it was (especially by moonlight)
to the figure of a fisherman with his peaked cap and blouse. She
believed there was more in this than a chance resemblance; for to a
Breton girl the supernatural world is very real: and she had no doubt
that the spirit of Paul's father haunted the stone that was so like his
bodily form, and that on the night when he was drowned, the dumb menhir
had found voice, and had spoken to her mother in his name. Annette
always avoided Jean of Kerdual, if it was possible to do so, and would
never let his shadow fall upon her. She felt that the solemn, world-old
stone was in some way hostile to her, and attributed her dumbness to its
influence.

She often wished that she and her father did not live so near the stone.
It had come to be like a nightmare to her. She would dream that it stood
threateningly over her, enveloping her in its shadow: that she was
struggling to speak, and that i