Some one stopped before the door, and came up the small stone steps.
He!--O God!--he! Some one had knocked,--it could be no other than he!
She was up now, barefooted; she, so feeble for the last few days, had
sprung up as nimbly as a kitten, with her arms outstretched to wind
round her darling. Of course the _Leopoldine_ had arrived at night,
and anchored in Pors-Even Bay, and he had rushed home; she arranged all
this in her mind with the swiftness of lightning. She tore the flesh
off her fingers in her excitement to draw the bolt, which had stuck.
"Eh?"
She slowly moved backward, as if crushed, her head falling on her
bosom. Her beautiful insane dream was over. She could just grasp that
it was not her husband, her Yann, and that nothing of him, substantial
or spiritual, had passed through the air; she felt plunged again into
her deep abyss, to the lowest depths of her terrible despair.
Poor Fantec--for it was he--stammered many excuses: his wife was very
ill, and their child was choking in its cot, suddenly attacked with a
malignant sore throat; so he had run over to beg for assistance on the
road to fetch the doctor from Paimpol.
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