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 friends, all the district, had come to pay a tribute of emotion at so sudden and swift a death.  Thus, this time, the cortege did stretch far away behind the hearse, draped with white and blooming with white roses in the bright sunshine.  The whole family was present; the mother and the sisters had declared that they would only quit their loved one when she had been lowered into her last resting-place.  And after the family came the friends, the Beauchenes, the Seguins, and others.  But Mathieu and Marianne, worn out, overcome by suffering, no longer recognized people amid their tears.  They only remembered on the morrow that they must have seen Morange, if indeed it were really Morange—­that silent, unobtrusive, almost shadowy gentleman, who had wept while pressing their hands.  And in like fashion Mathieu fancied that, in some horrible dream, he had seen Constance’s spare figure and bony profile drawing near to him in the cemetery after the coffin had been lowered into the grave, and addressing vague words of consolation to him, though he fancied that her eyes flashed the while as if with abominable exultation.

What was it that she had said?  He no longer knew.  Of course her words must have been appropriate, even as her demeanor was that of a mourning relative.  But a memory returned to him, that of other words which she had spoken when promising to attend the two weddings.  She had then in bitter fashion expressed a wish that the good fortune of Chantebled might continue.  But they, the Froments, so fruitful and so prosperous, were now stricken in their turn, and their good fortune had perhaps departed forever!  Mathieu shuddered; his faith in the future was shaken; he was haunted by a fear of seeing prosperity and fruitfulness vanish, now that there was that open breach.