WHITEWASH
PROLOGUE
THE July sun blazed unrelentingly upon the wide, hard-baked road that led, straight as a giant ruler, across the forlorn level country. Gorse and stubble, ground-pine and intensely green, wiry broom covered the moors, from which a quivering radiance of heat mounted to the molten sky, the horizon shook with it, and the distant dome of the Basilica of St. Anne of Auray, with its golden statue, wavered upward like a white flame.
It was St. Anne's Eve, and the incoming human tide was near its flood. The following day would bring the great feast, when the cure-working statue would be carried in procession. The throng
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