But the Durance stifled my cries with its thundering voice; and, broad and indifferent, expanded and drove its flood onward with tranquil obstinacy.

I turned back to the room and went and kissed Babet, who was weeping.  Little Marie was smiling in her sleep.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said to my wife.  “The water cannot always rise.  It will certainly go down.  There is no danger.”

“No, there is no danger,” Jacques repeated feverishly.  “The house is solid.”

At that moment Marguerite, who had approached the window, tormented by that feeling of curiosity which is the outcome of fear, leant forward like a mad thing and fell, uttering a cry.  I threw myself before the window, but could not prevent Jacques plunging into the water.  Marguerite had nursed him, and he felt the tenderness of a son for the poor old woman.  Babet had risen in terror, with joined hands, at the sound of the two splashes.  She remained there, erect, with open mouth and distended eyes, watching the window.

I had seated myself on the wooden handrail, and my ears were ringing with the roar of the flood.  I do not know how long it was that Babet and I were in this painful state of stupor, when a voice called to me.  It was Jacques who was holding on to the wall beneath the window.  I stretched out my hand to him, and he clambered up.

Babet clasped him in her arms.  She could sob now; and she relieved herself.

No reference was made to Marguerite.  Jacques did not dare say he had been unable to find her, and we did not dare question him anent his search.

He took me apart and brought me back to the window.

“Father,” he said to me in an undertone, “there are more than seven feet of water in the courtyard, and the river is still rising.  We cannot remain here any longer.”

Jacques was right.  The house was falling to pieces, the planks of the outbuildings were going away one by one.  Then this death of Marguerite weighed upon us.  Babet, bewildered, was beseeching us.  Marie alone remained peaceful in the big bed? with her doll between her arms, and slumbering with the happy smile of an angel.

The peril increased at every minute.  The water was on the point of reaching the handrail of the window and pouring into the room.  Any one would have said that it was an engine of war making the farmhouse totter with regular, dull, hard blows.  The current must be running right against the facade, and we could not hope for any human assistance.

“Every minute is precious,” said Jacques in agony.  “We shall be crushed beneath the ruins.  Let us look for boards, let us make a raft.”

He said that in his excitement.  I would naturally have preferred a thousand times to be in the middle of the river, on a few beams lashed together, than beneath the roof of this house which was about to fall in.  But where could we lay hands on the beams we required?  In a rage I tore the planks from the cupboards, Jacques broke the furniture, we took away the shutters, every piece of wood we could reach.  And feeling it was impossible to utilise these fragments, we cast them into the middle of the room in a fury, and continued searching.