Oh! these resolutions taken twenty times and as many times broken. . . . We dare not take them again or at any rate dare not say that we have taken them. The will flags, and the days slip by while we wait inert for the return of courage and self-respect. Slowly, however, we came back to our normal manner of existence. I used to call him in the evenings and we would walk up and down the deck together for hours on end, talking almost in the old way, in the mournful wind and the fine rain. He had still the same fashion of thinking and speaking as before, very naïve and at the same time very profound; it was the same, but with just the least suggestion of constraint; there was something frigid between us which would not thaw. I waited for a word of repentance which did not come. Winter was advancing, the winter of the Channel, which envelopes everything--thoughts, and men, and things--in the same grey twilight. The cold dark days had come, and our evening walk was taken at a quicker pace in the damp wind of the sea. There were times when I wanted to grip his hand and say to him: "Come, brother, I have forgiven you; let us forget all about it." But I checked the words on my lips; after all it was for him to ask forgiveness; and there remained a kind of haughty coldness in my manner which kept him at a distance from me. This _Sèvre_ was not a success for us at all, that was clear. CHAPTER LXIV Little Pierre is at Plouherzel, trying to play in front of his grandmother's door--quite lost as he looks at the motionless sheet of water before him, with the large beastlike shape which seems to be asleep in the centre, behind a veil of mist. There is free air and open sky here, to be sure, but the wind is keener than at Toulven, and the country more desolate; and children feel these things by instinct; in the presence of things forlorn, they have involuntary melancholies and silences--as birds have. Here now are two little comrades who have come from a neighbouring cottage to take stock of him, the little new-comer. But they are not those of Toulven; they do not know the same games; the few little words which they are able to speak are not of the same Breton. And, therefore, not venturing much on one side or the other, they remain all three at gaze, with shy smiles and comical little airs. It was yesterday that little Pierre arrived at Plouherzel with Marie Kermadec. Yves had written to his wife bidding her make this journey as soon as she could; the thought had come to him suddenly, the hope indeed, that this might reconcile them with his mother. For the old woman, always hard and headstrong, after having in the first instance flatly refused her consent to their marriage, had accepted it subsequently with bad grace, and, since, had not even troubled to answer their letters.