The priest changed colour; no smile came into his face in response to hers. He stepped nearer, and placed his hand upon her comely arm. “It has been a very bad voyage for your poor husband,” he said. “The Holy Virgin give you comfort.” Slowly the colour vanished from the woman's round checks. Her soft, short-sighted eyes filled with a terrible, hopeless dismay as she stared at the young priest's bowed head. The women round now began to understand, and they crossed themselves with a very human prayer of thankfulness that their husbands and brothers had been spared. “Loic is dead?” she said, in a rasping voice. For some moments she stood motionless, then, in obedience to some strange and unaccountable instinct, she began turning up the sleeves of her rough brown dress, as if she were going to begin some kind of manual work. “The Holy Virgin comfort you, my daughter; and you, my little one,” said the priest, as he stooped to lay his hand upon the golden head of the child. “Loic is dead! Loic is dead!” spread from mouth to mouth. “That comes from having ought to do with the priests,” muttered the customs officer, beneath his heavy moustache. He was an old soldier, who read the newspapers, and spoke in a loud voice on Sunday evenings in the Café de l'Ouest. The Abbé heard the remark, and looked at the man, but said nothing. He remembered that no Jesuit must defend himself. The girl-widow stepped on board the untidy vessel in a mechanical, dreamy way. She dragged the little trotting child almost roughly after her. Christian Vellacott stood at the low cabin door. He was in the dress of a Probationer of the Society of Jesus, which he had assumed at the request, hesitatingly made, of René Drucquer, and for the very practical reason that he had nothing else to wear except a torn dress-coat and Hoel Grall's Sunday garments. “Bless me, mon père,” lisped the little one, stopping in front of him. “Much good will a blessing of mine do you, little one,” he muttered in English. Nevertheless, he lifted the child up and kissed her rosy cheek. He kept her by his side, letting the mother go to her dead husband alone. When the woman came from the cabin half-an-hour later, hard-faced, and with dry, stony eyes, she found the child sitting on Christian's knee, prattling away in broken French. Tears came to her aching eyes at the sight of the happy, fatherless child; the hard Breton heart was touched at last.