"P.S.--I have just learnt that my destination is altered; I am embarking on the _Ariane_ which does not leave until the middle of November. That gives me nearly two months to spend with my wife. We shall have good time in which to get to know one another, and you may be sure I am very pleased."
On their return from their voyages, sailors are wont to do all sorts of stupid things with their money; it is a thing excused by tradition. And seaport towns have reason to know their rather wild eccentricities.
Sometimes, even, they marry, by way of pastime, the first woman that offers in order to have an occasion for donning a black coat.
And Yves, who had already in times past exhausted all kinds of foolishness, he, too, for a change, had finished by marrying.
Yves married! And to whom in heaven's name? Perhaps some shameless hussy of the town, picked up by chance in an hour when he was tipsy!
I had good reason to be uneasy, remembering a certain creature in a feathered hat whom he had been on the point of marrying for a lark--when he was twenty--in this same town of Brest.
Two months later, when the _Ariane_ was about to depart, fate decreed that I, too, should be appointed, at the last moment, to join its staff.
At the moment of leaving I saw this Marie Keremenen, whom I had half dreaded to meet. She was a young woman of about twenty years of age, dressed in the costume of the village of Toulven, in lower Brittany.
Her fine dark eyes were clear and frank. Without being absolutely pretty, she had a certain charm in her embroidered bodice, her white wide-winged head-dress, and her large collarette recalling a Medici ruff.
There was about her something candid, something wholesome which it did you good to see. It seemed to me that she was exactly what I should have looked for if it had fallen to me to choose for my brother Yves.
Chance had brought the two together, one day when she was on a visit to her godmother in Brest.
The lover lost no time, and she, won over by Yves' manly air, by his honest, winning smile, had been induced to consent--not without a certain uneasiness, nevertheless--to this precipitate marriage, which was going, for a start, to make her a widow for some seven or eight months.