"Until my hair grows long again," said poor Val, biting her lip painfully.
"Sleep in it too?" Val nodded, and Haidee made haste to help Bran to pommes frites which he loved.
Next morning, Bran waking up and throwing out an arm for his matutinal hug, encountered something strange to his touch: something round, bumpy, and slightly scrubby, very different to the soft nest he was used to dabble his hand in as soon as he woke. The blue scarf had slipped down while Val slept and her shorn head lay cruelly outlined upon the pillow. Bran knelt up and considered her in consternation mingled with pity, then finding himself in the attitude of prayer, mechanically crossed himself and murmured his morning orison, his eyes still fixed on his mother's head:
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart, take it please, and preserve it from sin."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my soul and my life.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me in my last agony.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, grant that I live and die in thy holy company. Amen."
Immediately afterwards humour, that Irish vice, overcame all gentler feelings; like a certain famous Bishop of Down, Bran would lose a friend for a joke. He woke Val with a cruel jest:
"Bon jour, Monsieur le Curé!"
The curé of Mascaret was a Breton as rugged as his country, with haggard spiritual eyes and an upper lip you could built a fort on, as the saying is; he intensified his uncomeliness by wearing his hair so close-shaved that it was impossible to say where his tonsure began or ended. To be told by her loving but candid son that she resembled this good man was a cruel thrust to Val, and the memory of it darkened life for many days to come. She wrapped herself in gloom and the blue veil, and nothing more was heard of the fez cap and cigarettes except that in good time the Stores forwarded them and the French Customs taxed them. After once trying on the fez and finding herself the image of a sallow and melancholy Turk, she had cast it from her. Her one instinct was to hide her ugliness from every one. Even at the sight of John the Baptist she would fly and hide, and she never left the house except after dark, when for exercise she would sometimes race Haidee up and down the digue, or run along the beach at midnight, her scarf floating behind her in the wind, and her head bare to give her "roots" a chance.