"Your family—my family. Forgive me if I seem impertinent, but it's important to me. I've come a long way, from America to Cornwall and now to Brittany, trying to trace down my own line...." He paused, looking again into that remarkable face that watched him, darkly handsome, darkly mocking in the firelight. "Will you tell me your name?"
"Kerrel," said the man slowly. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur. The resemblance is indeed striking. I mistook you for one of my kin."
Trehearne was frowning. "Kerrel?" he repeated, and shook his head. "My people were called Cahusac, before they went into Cornwall."
"There was doubtless a connection," said Kerrel easily. He pointed abruptly to the open space beyond. "Look—they begin the final ritual."
The great bonfire had burned low. The peasants and the fisherfolk, some hundreds of them, were gathered in a circle around the windy glow of the flames. A white-bearded old man began to pray, in the craggy Breton Gaelic.
Trehearne barely turned his head. His mind was full of the stranger, and of all the things that had oppressed and worried and driven him since childhood, the nagging little mysteries about himself to which now, perhaps, he would find the key.
He glanced away only a second, following the gesture of Kerrel's arm. But when he looked back, Kerrel was gone.
Trehearne took half a dozen aimless steps, searching for the man, but he had melted away into the darkness and the crowd, and Trehearne stopped, feeling sold and furious.
His temper, long the bane of a rather luckless existence, reared up and bared its claws. He had always been childishly sensitive to insults. If he could have got his hands on the contemptuous Kerrel he would have thrashed him. He turned again to the festival, controlling himself as he had learned painfully to do, realizing that he was being ridiculous. But his face, so like that of the vanished stranger, had a very ugly look around the mouth.
The Bretons had begun the procession around the waning fire. Short, burly men in bright jackets and broad-brimmed hats, sturdy women in aprons and long skirts, their improbable starched coifs fluttering with ribbons and lace. Sabots clumped heavily on the stony ground. They would march three times sunward, circling the embers, and then solemnly, each one, pick up a pebble and as solemnly cast it into the coals. Then they would scramble for the charred brands and bear them home to be charms against fever and lightning and the murrain until the next Midsummer Eve.