“The calm before the storm,” Garrassime, whom nothing escaped, said to himself. He had no confidence in the future, but he wisely kept his own counsel. At the beginning of September a succession of squalls ended by a regular gale of the type which churns the Channel into amazing emotions. The North Sea and the Atlantic, hereditary enemies as they are, never miss an occasion to dash at each other’s throats on what they evidently consider a stretch of neutral water; and when this warring at close range begins, both coasts had best draw in their horns, for there is certain to occur what the Bretons and Normans call graphically “_de la casse_.” * * * * * Several wrecks had been reported, and the life-saving station at Salvières, lavishly endowed and equipped by Jean--for there are long stretches of bare shore on either side of the Castle where no government _bâteau de sauvetage_ is housed--was, so to speak, day and night on the alert. On the fourth day of the gale (and according to the weather-wise there, if a gale lasts thrice over twenty-four hours, it is a bad business) the entire household was awakened about four in the morning by the appalling noise of a storm such as even in that region is something of a rarity. Mountainous waves escaladed the cliff, slavering with rage at their incapacity to scale them entirely; the wind raised so hoarse a voice that one could not hear oneself talk, even in a closed room with walls all of nine feet thick; and the air outside was so dense with spume and flying spindrift that the night had grown old without the faintest hint of dawn. Assembled in the _Salle des Chevaliers_, the family and a number of servants awaited God only knew what! There was an impression of disaster in the all-embracing clangor which none could overlook or disregard, used as they all were to similar manifestations, and as the bell for matins faintly pierced the uproar, all filed laboriously along the cloisters into the chapel where the Abbé de Kerdren, the Duke’s cousin and chaplain, was kneeling on the altar steps. He rose as they entered and faced round toward them, his hands still clasped and his finely modeled features looking white and drawn in the yellow light of the blessed candles--a tall and martial figure, whose vestments took upon him the look of knightly coat-armor, for he had begun life as a naval officer, and had only entered holy orders after the death of his bride of two months, killed in a hunting accident. “_Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae_,” he began, raising his voice, for here too the roar of sea and wind was deafening. Jean and Marguerite, kneeling side by side on the purple cushions of the last step--Tatiana and Régis with Piotr between them were close to the draped rail--could scarcely hear the prayer, and as she whispered it on her moonstone beads she suddenly thought of one line in a ballad that she loved and often sang: