The last was the subject Cécile lingered over longest. It was necessary that the English cousin should understand the meaning of his Breton birthright.
"If you were a sailor, Monsieur," she was saying now, pointing across the bay, "you might see strange things."
"Strange things?" he echoed. "Nay, cousin, what kind of things mean you?"
She crossed herself devoutly.
"One does not speak of them, but they are there—the spirits of those whom the sea has taken. On winter nights we may hear them wailing and imploring for Christian burial; but only a sailor may see their forms."
"Then I am glad to be no sailor. I confess the sea has no attractions for me."
"It is cruel, cruel," she answered, gazing wistfully out over the grey waste of waters. "Sometimes it makes me afraid, when I see the great waves dashing and roaring over the rocks. Jéhan laughs at me and says I am no Bretonne to feel so, for we are a people of the sea. Yet I cannot help it, sometimes, when I think of those poor women and children who have waited and waited in vain for the husbands who never came back."
"And yet you come here to watch the waves you fear?"
Morice's smile was faintly quizzical.
"Oh yes," she replied naïvely, "I come here often to make my dreams. I like to picture what it must have been like long, long ago before the cruel sea swallowed up so much of our Brittany."