"Mais oui, mon enfant. What do you want?"
"Nothing. It is only that I was thinking."
"The strange child that you are!" she would exclaim. "You are not like the others."
"La Rose," he would ask, "was it by here that La Belle Mélanie passed on the night she saw the death fire?"
"Yes, by this very spot. She was on her way to Pig Cove, over beyond the Calvary to the east. It is a desolate little rat-hole, Pig Cove, nowadays; but then it was different—as many as two dozen houses. My stepmother lived in one of them. Now there are scarcely six, and falling to pieces at that. La Belle Mélanie, she was a Boudrot, sister of the Pierre Boudrot whose son, Théobald, was brother-in-law of stepmother. That was many years ago. They are all dead now, or gone away from here—to Boston, I daresay."
"Will you tell me about that again,—the feu follet and Mélanie?"
It was the story Michel liked the best, most of all when he could sit beside La Rose, on a moss-hummock of some rough hill on the barrens. Perhaps there would be cloud shadows flitting like dream presences across the shining face of the moor. In the distance, over the backs of the hills that crouched so thickly about them, he saw the stretch of the ocean, a motionless floor of azure and purple, flecked, it might be, by a leaning sail far away; and now and then a gull or two would fly close over their heads, wheeling and screaming for a few seconds, and then off again through the blue.
"S'il vous plaît, tante La Rose, see how many berries I have picked already!"
The little woman was not difficult of persuasion.
"It was in November," she began. "There had not been any snow yet; but the nights were cold and terribly dark under a sky of clouds. That autumn, as my stepmother often told me, many people had seen the horse without head as it galloped claquin-claquant across the barrens. At Gros Nez it was so bad that no one dared go out after dark, unless it was to run with all one's force to the neighbors—but not across the woods to save their souls. Especially because of the feu follet.