s while the poor corpse remained there under a harvest of
flowers. And there was this cruel aggravation, that on the eve of the
funeral, when the body had been laid in the coffin, it was brought down
into that gallery where they had lunched so merrily while discussing how
magnificently they might decorate it for the two weddings. It was there
that the last funeral watch, the last wake, took place, and there were
no evergreen shrubs, no garlands of foliage, merely four tapers which
burnt there amid a wealth of white roses gathered in the morning, but
already fading. Neither the mother nor the father was willing to go
to bed that night. They remained, side by side, near the child whom
mother-earth was taking back from them. They could see her quite little
again, but sixteen months old, at the time of their first sojourn at
Chantebled in the old tumbledown shooting-box, when she had just been
weaned and they were wont to go and cover her up at nighttime. They saw
her also, later on, in Paris, hastening to them in the morning, climbing
up and pulling their bed to pieces with triumphant laughter. And they
saw her yet more clearly, growing and becoming more beautiful even as
Chantebled did, as if, indeed, she herself bloomed with all the health
and beauty of that now fruitful land. Yet she was no more, and whenever
the thought returned to them that they would never see her again, their
hands sought one another, met in a woful clasp, while from their crushed
and mingling hearts it seemed as if all life, all future, were flowing
away to nihility. Now that a breach had been made, would not every other
happiness be carried off in turn? And though the ten other children
were there, from the little one five years old to the twins who were
four-and-twenty, all clad in black, all gathered in tears around their
sleeping sister, like a sorrow-stricken battalion rendering funeral
honors, neither the father nor the mother saw or counted them: their
hearts were rent by the loss of the daughter who had departed, carrying
away with her some of their own flesh. And in that long bare gallery
which the four candles scarcely lighted, the dawn at last arose upon
that death watch, that last leave-taking.

Then grief again came with the funeral procession, which spread out
along the white road between the lofty poplars and the green corn, that
road over which Rose had galloped so madly through the storm. All the
relations of the Froments, all their