"I thought you were bridge-building in the West."
"I could get away at last. I crossed the Atlantic because I wanted to see you. Do you mind, very much?"
"Do I mind seeing you here, in Brittany? No, I do not know that I mind that.... Sit down and tell me about America. America has seemed so far away, these still, still days ... farther away than the sun and the moon."
Long and clean-limbed, with his sea-blue eyes and quizzical look, Fay threw himself down upon the sand beside her. They talked that day of people at home, of the work he had been doing and of her long absence at Gilead Balm. She made him see the place—the old man who had died—and Old Miss and Miss Serena and Captain Bob and the servants and Lisa.
"They are going to live on there?"
"Yes. Just as they have done, until they, too, die.... Oh, Gilead Balm!"
Late in the afternoon, the sun making a red path across the waters, and the red-sailed boats growing larger, coming toward the land, they walked back to the village together. He left her at the door of the curé's house. He himself was staying at the inn. She did not ask him how long he would stay, or if he was on his way to other, larger places. The situation accepted itself.
There followed some days of wandering together, through the little grey town, or over the green headland to a country beyond of pine trees and Druid stones, or, in the evening light, along the sands. They found a sailboat, with an old, hale boatman, for hire, and they went out in this boat. Sometimes the wind carried them along, swift as a leaf; sometimes they went as in a sea-revery, so dreamily. The boatman knew all the legends of the sea; he told them stories of the King of Ys and the false Ahés, and then he talked of the Pardons of his youth. Sometimes they skirted the coast, sometimes they went so far out that the land was but an eastward-lying shadow. The next day, perhaps, they wandered inland, over the heath among dolmens and menhirs, or, seated on old wreckage upon the sands, the dark blue sea before them, now they talked and now they kept company with silence. They talked little rather than much. The place was taciturn, and her mood made for quiet.
It was not until the fourth day that he told her for what he had come. "But you know for what I came."
"Yes, I know."