The tears flowed afresh. I leaned against the parapet of the jetty for comfort's sake, and looked around me. Ravetot-sur-Mer was not the place to attract visitors in December. A shingle beach with a few fishing-boats hauled out of reach of the surf; a miniature casino, like an impudently large summer-house, shuttered-up, weather-beaten and desolate; a weather-beaten, desolate, and shuttered-up Hôtel de l'Univers, and a perky deserted villa or two on the embankment; a cliff behind them, topped by a little grey church; the road that led up the gorge losing itself in the turn--and that was all that was visible of Ravetot-sur-Mer. A projecting cliff bounded the bay at each side, and in front seethed the grey, angry Channel. It was an Aceldama of a spot in winter; and only a matter of peculiar urgency had brought me hither. Pauline and her decrepit rascal of a father were tied to Ravetot by sheer poverty. He owned a pretty villa half a mile inland, and the rent he obtained for it during the summer enabled them to live in some miraculous way the rest of the year. They, the Curé and the fisher-folk, were the sole winter inhabitants of the place. The nearest doctor lived at Merville, twenty kilometres away, and there was not even an educated farmer in the neighbourhood. Yet I could not help thinking that my little friend's last remark was somewhat disingenuous. "Are you quite sure, my dear," I said, "that no one ever comes to Ravetot?" "Has father told you?" she asked tonelessly. "No. I guessed it. I have extraordinary powers of divination. And the Somebody has been making my little girl miserable." "He has broken my heart," said Pauline. I pulled the collar of my fur-lined coat above my ears which the north-east wind was biting. Being elderly and heart-whole I am sensitive to cold. I proposed that we should walk up and down the jetty while she told me her troubles, and I hooked her arm in mine. "Who was he?" I asked. "And what was he doing here?" "Oh, Doctor! what does it matter?" she answered tearfully. "I never want to see him again." "Don't fib," said I. "If the confounded blackguard were here now----" "But he isn't a blackguard!" she flashed. "If he were I shouldn't be so miserable. I should forget him. He is good and kind, and noble, and everything that is right. I couldn't have expected him to act otherwise--it was awful, horrible--and when you called me by name I thought it was he----" "And the contradictious feminine did very much want to see him?" said I. "I suppose so," she confessed. I looked down at her pretty face and saw that it was wan and pinched. "You have been eating little and sleeping less. For how long?" I demanded sternly. "For a week," she said pitifully. "We must change all that. This abominable hole is a kind of cold storage for depression." She drew my arm tighter. She had always been an affectionate little girl, and now she seemed to crave human sympathy and companionship.