He waited upon me all the evening, but with a quick attention to my
wants, which I had never met with in any hired servant. It was not
unfamiliar to me, for in my own country I had often been served only by
men; and especially during my girlhood, when I had lived far away in the
country, upon my father's sheep-walk. I knew it was Tardif who fried the
fish which came in with my tea; and, when the night closed in, it was he
who trimmed the oil-lamp and brought it in, and drew the check curtains
across the low casement, as if there were prying eyes to see me on the
opposite bank. Then a deep, deep stillness crept over the solitary
place--a stillness strangely deeper than that even of the daytime. The
wail of the sea-gulls died away, and the few busy cries of the farm-yard
ceased; the only sound that broke the silence was a muffled, hollow boom
which came up the ravine from the sea.

Before nine o'clock Tardif and his mother had gone up-stairs to their
rooms in the thatch; and I lay wearied but sleepless in my bed,
listening to these dull, faint, ceaseless murmurs, as a child listens to
the sound of the sea in a shell. Was it possible that it was I, myself,
the Olivia who had been so loved and cherished in her girlhood, and so
hated and tortured in later years, who was come to live under a
fisherman's roof, in an island, the name of which I barely knew four
days ago?

I fell asleep at last, yet I awoke early; but not so early that the
other inmates of the cottage were not up, and about their day's work. It
was my wish to wait upon myself, and so diminish the cost of living with
these secluded people; but I found it was not to be so; Tardif waited
upon me assiduously, as well as his deaf mother. The old woman would not
suffer me to do any work in my own room, but put me quietly upon one