"However, Lucien got his appointment. The pay? Enough to marry on, for a free couple. But the families were poor on both sides--long families, too. Folk live long on Ile Lezan--women-folk especially; accidents at the fishery keep down the men. Still, and allowing for that, the average is high. Lucien had even a great-grandmother alive--a most worthy soul--and on Jeanne's side the grandparents survived on both sides. Where there are grandparents they must be maintained. "No one builds on Ile Lezan. Luden and Jeanne--on either side their families crowded to the very windows. If only the smallest hovel might fall vacant! . . . For a week or two it seemed that a cottage might drop in their way; but it happened to be what you call picturesque, and a rich man snapped it up. He was a stranger from Paris, and called himself an artist; but in truth he painted little, and that poorly--as even _I_ could see. He was fonder of planning what he would have, and what not, to indulge his mood when it should be in the key for painting. Happening here just when the cottage fell empty, he offered a price for it far beyond anything Lucien could afford, and bought it. For a month or two he played with this new toy, adding a studio and a veranda, and getting over many large crates of furniture from the mainland. Then by and by a restlessness overtook him--that restlessness which is the disease of the rich--and he left us, yet professing that it delighted him always to keep his little _pied-a-terre_ in Ile Lezan. He has never been at pains to visit us since. "But meanwhile Lucien and Jeanne had no room to marry and set up house. It was a heavy time for them. They had some talk together of crossing over and finding a house on the mainland; but it came to nothing. The parents on both sides would not hear of it, and in truth Jeanne would have found it lonely on the mainland, away from her friends and kin; for Lucien, you see, must in any case spend half his time on the lighthouse on Ile Ouessant. So many weeks on duty, so many weeks ashore--thus it works, and even so the loneliness wears them; though our Bretons, being silent men by nature, endure it better than the rest.