Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/196

188 and townspeople and fisher people to stand and worship at the altar of the Virgin, there in the corner. I made it of wax, and stamped the face with a seal that Charles gave me. He was to have been my husband when I left the school."

"Indeed, mademoiselle?"

"Yes, but the soldiers burnt his house. It was but a week after I left the school, and the Château Sant-Ervoan lay but a mile from my mother's house. He fled to us, wounded; and we carried him to the coast—there was a price on his head, and we, too, had to flee—and escaped over to England. He died on this bed, Yann. Look—" She lifted a candle, and there on the bed's ledge I read, in gilt lettering, some words I have never forgotten, though it was not until years after that I got a priest to explain them to me. They were "."

While I stared, she set the candle down again and gently drew the curtains round the bed.

"Rise now and dress, dear child, or your supper will be cold and the farmer impatient. You have done me good. Although I have written the farmer's letters for him, it never seemed to me that I wrote to living people: for all I used to know in Brittany, ten years ago, are dead. For the future I shall write to you." She turned at the door as she said this, and that was the last I ever saw of her. For when I passed out of the room, dressed and ready for my