ff and the blood dripping from it.

When it faded, my mother Nataline went to the window, and there on the
floor, in a little red pool, she found the body of a dead cross-bill,
all torn and wounded by the glass through which it had crashed.

She took it up and fondled it. Then she gave a great sigh, and went to
my father Marcel and kneeled beside him.

(You understand, m'sieu', it was he who narrated all this to me. He
said he never should forget a word or a look of it until he died--and
perhaps not even then.)

So she kneeled beside him and put one hand over his shoulder, the dead
cross-bill in the other.

"Marcel," she said, "thou and I love each other so much that we must
always go together--whether to heaven or to hell--and very soon our
little baby is to be born. Wilt thou keep a secret from me now? Look,
this is the last messenger at the window--the blessed bird whose bill
is twisted because he tried to pull out the nail from the Saviour's
hand on the cross, and whose feathers are always red because the blood
of Jesus fell upon them. It is a message of pardon that he brings us,
if we repent. Come, tell the whole of the sin."

At this the heart of my father Marcel was melted within him, as a
block of ice is melted when it floats into the warmer sea, and he told
her all of the shameful thing that he had done.

She stood up and took the ring from the table with the ends of her
fingers, as if she did not like to touch it.

"Where hast thou put it," she asked, "the finger of the hand from
which this thing was stolen?"

"It is among the bushes," he answered, "beside the path to the
landing."

"Thou canst find it," said she, "as we go to the boat, for the moon is
shining and the night is still. Then thou shalt put the ring where it
belongs, and we will row to the place where the hand is--dost thou
remember it?"

So they did as she commanded. The sea was very quiet and the moon was
full. They rowed together until they came about two miles from the
_Point du Caribou_, at a place which Marcel remembered because there
was a broken cliff on the shore.

When he dropped the finger, with the great ring glittering upon it,
over the edge of the boat, he groaned. But the water received the
jewel in silence, with smooth ripples, and a circle of light spread
away from it under the moon, and my mother Nataline smiled like one
who is well content.

"Now," she said, "we have done what the messengers at the window told