It is Marie who speaks:
"He became very difficult towards the end, he who had always been so considerate. He said we did not know how to look after him, and he asked continually for his son Yves: 'Oh! if Yves were here he would help me; he would lift me in his strong arms and turn me over in my bed.' On the last night he called him without ceasing."
And Yves replied:
"What grieves me most when I think of our father, is that we were a little angry with each other on the day I went away, in connection with the settlement, you know. You cannot believe how often the recollection of that dispute with him comes into my mind."
Dinner is finished. It is evening, the long mild evening of May. We are walking, Yves and I, towards the church, to pay a visit to a white cross which stands there on a little flower-decked mound:
Yvonne Kermadec, thirteen months.
"They say that she was very like me," says Yves.
And this resemblance of the dead infant to him makes him very thoughtful.
As we look at the cross, the mound and the flowers, we both think of this mystery: a little baby girl who was of his blood, his issue, who had his eyes, and . . . probably, too, his nature, and who was given back so soon to the Breton earth. It is as if something of himself had already gone from him to mingle with the dust; it was like an earnest-money which he had already given to eternal nothingness. . . .
In four years, this little cross which may be seen now from the distance, will exist no longer; Yvonne and her mound and her flowers will be swept away. Even her little bones will be gathered up and mixed with the others, the bones of those long dead, under the church, in the ossuary.