"But this is like you English--you keep your word. . . . You will hardly believe," he confided, as I shared his admirable dejeuner-- soup, langouste, an incomparable omelet, stuffed veal, and I forget what beside--"you will hardly believe with what difficulty I bring myself back to this horizon." He waved a hand to the blue sea-line beyond his window. "When one has tasted progress--" He broke off. "But, thanks be to God, we too, on Ile Lezan, are going to progress. You will visit my church and see how much we have need." He took me to it: a bleak, decayed building, half ruinated, the slated pavement uneven as the waves of the sea, the plastered walls dripping with saline ooze. From the roof depended three or four rudely carved ships, hung there _ex voto_ by parishioners preserved from various perils of the deep. He narrated their histories at length. "The roof leaks," he said, "but we are to remedy that. At length the blessed Mary of Lezan will be housed, if not as befits her, at least not shamefully." He indicated a niched statue of the Virgin, with daubed red cheeks and a robe of crude blue overspread with blotches of sea-salt. "Thanks to your England," he added. "Why 'thanks to England'?" He chuckled--or perhaps I had better say chirruped. "Did I not say I had been visiting your country on business? Eh? You shall hear the story--only I tell no names." He took snuff. "We will call them," he said, "only by their Christian names, which are Lucien and Jeanne. . . . I am to marry them next month, when Lucien gets his relief from the lighthouse on Ile Ouessant. "They are an excellent couple. As between them, the wits are with Lucien, who will doubtless rise in his profession. He has been through temptation, as you shall hear. For Jeanne, she is _un coeur simple_, as again you will discover; not clever at all--oh, by no means!--yet one of the best of my children. It is really to Jeanne that we owe it all. . . . I have said so to Lucien, and just at the moment Lucien was trying to say it to me. "They were betrothed, you understand. Lucien was nineteen, and Jeanne maybe a year younger. From the beginning, it had been an understood thing: to this extent understood, that Lucien, instead of sailing to the fishery (whither go most of the young men of Ile Lezan and the coast hereabouts) was destined from the first to enter the lighthouse service under Government. The letters I have written to Government on his behalf! . . . I am not one of those who quarrel with the Republic. Still--a priest, and in this out-of-the-way spot--what is he?