"Not you, Jean; I want to talk to you--Marie-Louise will go."
"Marie-Louise!" exclaimed Jean, shaking his head. "But no! You have forgotten the storm, Gaston--and, see, she is all wet and tired, and she has been, I do not know how many hours, exposed out there on that curséd Perigeau."
A smile, half stubborn, half of pride, struggled through a twist of pain on the old fisherman's lips.
"And what of that! She has been brought up to it. A dozen times and more she has been longer in a storm than this. She is not of the milk-and-water breed is Marie-Louise, she is a Bernier, and, the _bon Dieu_ be praised, the Berniers do not stop for that! Is it not so, Marie-Louise?"
"Yes, uncle," she answered softly. "I will go; and I will not be long."
"Go then, Marie-Louise," he said. "I wish it."
She bent and kissed him, and picked up the lantern, and shook her head in a pretty gesture at Jean, as though half to tease him for the perturbed look upon his face, and half in grave wistfulness to charge him with the sick man's care--and then she went from the room, and presently the front door closed behind her.
The lamp flickered with the inrush of wind from the opening of the door--flickered over a spotless bare floor, an incongruous high-poster bed that had been a wedding gift to Marie-Louise's father and mother from the man who lay upon it now, flickered over the raftered ceiling, the scant furnishings which were a single chair and a table, flickered over a crucifix upon the wall--and then burned on once more in a steady flame. It was like the shrug of Jean's shoulders, the flicker of that lamp; for, with the shrug, he resumed again his former position over Gaston--it was true after all, Marie-Louise would come to no harm, they were used to that, they fisherfolk of Bernay-sur-Mer.
"_Tiens_, Gaston!" he said. "See, we will get off your wet clothes, and you will tell me how it happened this _misère_, and about the hurt. But first this--_mon Dieu!_--but I did not guess it was like that--a clean bandage, eh?--that is first--I will find something"--he had unbuttoned the other's jacket, disclosing a rent shirt, and, on the left side, a wad of cloth, blood-soaked now, where Marie-Louise evidently had made a pad for the wound with her underskirt, and had tied it in place with long strips torn from the garment. He began to loosen one of the strips; but Gaston, who until then had lain passive with eyes closed, caught his hand.