"Well, my poor children, I have come to help you to pass these
mournful hours."

But Sister Eulalie suddenly rose up.

"Thanks, father, but my brother and I would like to be left alone with
her. These are the last moments that we now have for seeing her; so we
want to feel ourselves once more, the three of us, just as we were
years ago when we--we--we were only children, and our poor--poor
mother--"

She was unable to finish with the flood of tears that gushed from her
eyes, and the sobs that were choking her.

But the priest bowed, with a more serene look on his face, for he was
thinking of his bed. "Just as you please, my children."

Then, he knelt down, again crossed himself, prayed, rose up, and
softly stole away murmuring as he went: "She was a saint."

They were left alone, the dead woman and her children. A hidden
timepiece kept regularly ticking in its dark corner, and through the
open window the soft odors of hay and of woods penetrated with faint
gleams of moonlight. No sound in the fields outside, save the
wandering notes of toads and now and then the humming of some
nocturnal insect darting into like a ball, and knocking itself against
the wall.

An infinite peace, a divine melancholy, a silent serenity surrounded
this dead woman, seemed to emanate from her, to evaporate from her
into the atmosphere outside and to calm Nature itself.

Then the magistrate, still on his knees, his head pressed against the
bed-clothes, in a far-off, heart-broken voice that pierced through the
sheets and the coverlet, exclaimed:

"Mamma, mamma, mamma!" And the sister, sinking down on the floor,
striking the wood with her forehead fanatically, twisting herself
about and quivering like a person in an epileptic fit, groaned:
"Jesus, Jesus--mamma--Jesus!"

And both of them shaken by a hurricane of grief panted with a rattling
in their throats.

Then the fit gradually subsided, and they now wept in a less violent
fashion, like the rainy calm that follows a squall on a storm-beaten
sea. Then, after some time, they rose, and fixed their glances on the
beloved corpse. And memories, those memories of the past, so sweet, so
torturing to-day, came back to their minds with all those little
forgotten details, those little details so intimate and familiar,
which make the being who is no more live over again. They recalled
circumstances, words, smiles, certain intonations of voice which
belonged to one whom they should hear