The Virgin Without a Face

Extract

This is the story that I have been told of the ruined chapel in the Bois-Marie.

When the sun sets peacefully behind clouds, there comes an hour of hushed stillness. And on the edge of the Bois-Marie, where there were no trees, but only broken ground, tangled with bramble and bracken and dappled with hollows where the rain lay, the quietness of all the world seemed to gather and brood.

It was a high place, lifted up on the cliffs that stood with their feet in the water, and little was visible that was not sky or sea of the nearer land rising and falling as it travelled into the distance. There were no houses, no ploughed fields, no trimness of man’s work. There was only the high breast of the earth, pale and clear and quiet; the grey sea, the luminous grey sky, and the grey hush that followed the sunset.