The Village on the Cliff.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ABBAYE AUX DAMES.

EANWHILE Catherine, in good

Mspirits and in better heart than she

had felt for many a day, was picking her way between the stones, and walking up the little village street with her husband. Fontaine nimbly advancing with neatly gaitered feet, bowed right and left to his acquaintance, stopping every now and then to inquire more particularly after this person's health, or that one's interests, as was his custom. The children were at play in the little gardens in front of the cottages, the women were sitting in groups dancing their bobbins, spinning, whirring, twisting, stitching. Their tongues were wagging to the flying of their fingers and the bobbing of their white caps.

to the women, who Between the houses

Some of the men were winding string upon nails fixed to the walls, some were mending their nets, others were talking answered, never ceasing their work for an instant. a faint, hazy sea showed glittering against the lime walls. Dominique, from the farm, came down the middle of the street with some horses clattering down to the water; Marion and others called out a greeting to him as he passed. "And when does Mademoiselle Chrétien return?" said Madame Potier from the door of her shop.

"Who can tell?" said Dominique, clattering away. "To-morrow perhaps." He took off his hat to Monsieur Fontaine, and Madame Potier beamed a recognition as they passed.

Catherine asked her husband why so many of the men were at home. She had not been long enough by the sea to read the signs of the times in the south-west wind now blowing gently in their faces-in the haze which hid the dark rocks of the Calvados.

Fontaine adjusted his glasses and looked up at the sky, and then at the