he same tragedy
of sudden death that they again participated, only this time it was
their own son whom they were to find in the same room, on the same bed,
frigid, pale, and lifeless.

Blaise had just expired. Boutan was there at the head of the bed,
holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was
dying away. And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively
crossed the disorderly drawing-room, rushing into that bedchamber whose
odor of nihility they recognized, he could but murmur in a voice full of
sobs:

"My poor friends, embrace him; you will yet have a little of his last
breath."

That breath had scarce ceased, and the unhappy mother, the unhappy
father, had already sprung forward, kissing those lips that exhaled the
final quiver of life, and sobbing and crying their distress aloud. Their
Blaise was dead. Like Rose, he had died suddenly, a year later, on a
day of festivity. Their heart wound, scarce closed as yet, opened afresh
with a tragic rending. Amid their long felicity this was the second time
that they were thus terribly recalled to human wretchedness; this was
the second hatchet stroke which fell on the flourishing, healthy, happy
family. And their fright increased. Had they not yet finished paying
their accumulated debt to misfortune? Was slow destruction now arriving
with blow following blow? Already since Rose had quitted them, her
bier strewn with flowers, they had feared to see their prosperity and
fruitfulness checked and interrupted now that there was an open breach.
And to-day, through that bloody breach, their Blaise departed in the
most frightful of fashions, crushed as it were by the jealous anger of
destiny. And now what other of their children would be torn away from
them on the morrow to pay in turn the ransom of their happiness?

Mathieu and Marianne long remained sobbing on their knees beside the
bed. Constance stood a few paces away, silent, with an air of quivering
desolation. Beauchene, as if to combat that fear of death which made
him shiver, had a moment previously seated himself at the little
writing-table formerly used by Maurice, which had been left in the
drawing-room like a souvenir. And he then strove to draw up a notice
to his workpeople, to inform them that the factory would remain closed
until the day after the funeral. He was vainly seeking words when he
perceived Denis coming out of the bedroom, where he had wept all his
tears and set his w