"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"  
That is one of our old sayings here in Provence. I used to laugh at it when I was young. I do not laugh at it now. When those words come into my heart, and they come often, I go by the rough hard way that leads upward to Notre Dame de la Garde until I come to the Crime Cross—it is a wearying toil for me to get up that steep hill-side, I am so stiff and old now—and there I cast fresh stones upon the heap at the foot of the cross. Each stone cast there, you know, is a prayer for forgiveness for some hidden crime: not a light fault, but a crime. The stones must be little stones, yet[136] the heap is very wide and high—though every winter, when the great mistrals are blowing across the étang de Berre, the little stones are whirled away down the hill-side. I do not know how this custom began, nor when; but it is a very old custom with us here in Les Martigues.
 
Once in every year I go up to the Crime Cross by night. This is on All Souls Eve. First I light the lamp over Magali's breast where she lies sleeping in the graveyard: going to the graveyard at dusk, as the others do, in the long procession that creeps up thither from the three parts of our town—from Jonquières, and the Isle, and Ferrières—to light the death-fires over the dear dead ones' graves. I go with the very first, as soon as the sun is down. I like to be alone with Magali while I light the little lamp that will be a guide for her soul through that night when souls are free; that will keep it safe from the devils who are free that night too. I do not like the low buzzing of voices which comes later, when the crowd is there, nor the broken cries and sobs. And when her lamp is lit, and I have lit my mother's lamp, I hurry away from the graveyard and the moaning people—threading my steps among the graves on[137] which the lights are beginning to glimmer, and through the oncoming crowd, and then by the lonely path through the olive-orchards, and so up the stony height until I come at last to the Crime Cross—panting, aching—and my watch begins.
 
 
MARIUS
Up on that high hill-side, open to the west, a little of the dying daylight lingers. Eastward, like a big black mirror, lies the great étang; and far away across its still waters the mountain chain above Berre and Rognac rises purple-grey against the darker sky. In the west still are faint crimson blotches, or dashes of dull blood-red—reflected again, and made bright............