"Pauline."
She pivoted round like a weather-cock in a gust and with a sharp cry leaped forward to meet me. Her face was aflame with great hope and joy. I have seen to my gladness that expression once before worn by a woman. But as soon as this one recognised me, the joy vanished, killed outright.
"Oh, it's you," she said, with a quivering lip.
"I am sorry, my dear," said I, taking her hand. "I can't help it. I wish from my heart I were somebody else."
She burst into tears. I put my arm around her and drew her to me, and patted her and said "There, there!" in the blundering masculine way. Having helped to bring her into the world twenty years before, I could claim fatherly privileges.
"Oh, Doctor," she sobbed, dabbing her pretty young eyes with a handkerchief. "Do forgive me. Of course I am glad to see you. It was the shock. I thought you were a ghost. No one ever comes to Ravetot."
"Never?" I asked mildly.
The tears flowed afresh. I leaned against the parapet of the jetty for comfort's sake, and looked around me. Ravetot-sur-Mer was not the place to attract visitors in December. A shingle beach with a few fishing-boats hauled out of reach of the surf; a miniature casino, like an impudently large summer-house, shuttered-up, weather-beaten and desolate; a weather-beaten, desolate, and shuttered-up Hôtel de l'Univers, and a perky deserted villa or two on the embankment; a cliff behind them, topped by a little grey church; the road that led up the gorge losing itself in the turn—and that was all that was visible of Ravetot-sur-Mer. A projecting cliff bounded the bay at each side, and in front seethed the grey, angry Channel. It was an Aceldama of a spot in winter; and only a matter of peculiar urgency had brought me hither. Pauline and her decrepit rascal of a father were tied to Ravetot by sheer poverty. He owned a pretty villa half a mile inland, and the rent he obtained for it during the summer enabled them to live in some miraculous way the rest of the year. They, the Curé and the fisher-folk, were the sole winter inhabitants of the place. The nearest doctor lived at Merville, twenty kilometres away, and there was not even an educated farmer in the neighbourhood. Yet I could not help thinking that my little friend's last remark was somewhat disingenuous.
"Are you quite sure, my dear," I said, "that no one ever comes to Ravetot?"
"Has father told you?" she asked tonelessly.