Meanwhile the days passed by.
She continued to dress every day, to put on a gay air, to go to the harbor a-gossiping with the others. She said that it was all quite natural, this delay. Didn’t they see the same thing every year? Oh, as to their coming back at all—with such good sailors, and two such good boats!
Afterwards, when she was back home at night, the old shiver of anxiety, of anguish, would come over her.
Could it be really possible that she began to fear—already? Was there any cause for fear? And she trembled, for having so soon been afraid.
The tenth of September! How the days flew by!
One morning when there was a cold mist over the earth, a true autumn morning, the rising sun found her early seated under the porch of the chapel of the shipwrecked mariners, at the place where the widows go to pray—seated, she was, with eyes fixed and temples tense as though held in a band of iron.
Two days ago these melancholy mists of dawn had begun, and on this particular morning Gaud had awakened with a more poignant inquietude, caused by this impression of winter. Why was it so this day, this hour, this moment, more than the preceding? She knew well enough that boats were often two weeks late—even a month.
But there was something different about this particular morning, without doubt, for she had come to-day for the first time to sit under the chapel porch and reread the names of the young men who had died.
In Memory of
GAOS, YVON,
Lost at Sea
Near the Norden-Fjord.
Like a great shudder, a gust of wind was heard rising from the sea, and at the same time something fell like rain upon the roof: it was the dead leaves. A whole host of them were blown in at the porch; the old wind-tossed trees of the graveyard were losing their foliage, stripped by this gale from the sea. Winter was coming.