Suzanne, touched by the devotion of the child, kissed her, but did not believe.

Yet the little one, also, kept her word, and despite the entreaties of her parents, despite the supplications of the elder, she never married.  She was pretty, very pretty; she refused many a young man who seemed to love her truly; and she never left her sister more.

* * * * *

They lived together all the days of their life, without ever being separated a single time.  They went side by side, inseparably united.  But Marguerite seemed always sad, oppressed, more melancholy than the elder, as though perhaps her sublime sacrifice had broken her spirit.  She aged more quickly, had white hair from the age of thirty, and often suffering, seemed afflicted by some secret, gnawing trouble.

Now she was to be the first to die.

Since yesterday she was no longer able to speak.  She had only said, at the first glimmers of day-dawn: 

“Go fetch Monsieur le Cure, the moment has come.”

And she had remained since then upon her back, shaken with spasms, her lips agitated as though dreadful words were mounting from her heart without power of issue, her look mad with fear, terrible to see.

Her sister, torn by sorrow, wept wildly, her forehead resting on the edge of the bed, and kept repeating: 

“Margot, my poor Margot, my little one!”

She had always called her, “Little One,” just as the younger had always called her “Big Sister.”

Steps were heard on the stairs.  The door opened.  A choir boy appeared, followed by an old priest in a surplice.  As soon as she perceived him, the dying woman, with one shudder, sat up, opened her lips, stammered two or three words, and began to scratch the sheets with her nails as if she had wished to make a hole.

The Abbe Simon approached, took her hand, kissed her brow, and with a soft voice: 

“God pardon thee, my child; have courage, the moment is now come, speak.”

Then Marguerite, shivering from head to foot, shaking her whole couch with nervous movements, stammered: 

“Sit down, Big Sister ... listen.”

The priest bent down toward Suzanne, who was still flung upon the bed’s foot.  He raised her, placed her in an armchair, and taking a hand of each of the sisters in one of his own, he pronounced: 

“Lord, my God!  Endue them with strength, cast Thy mercy upon them.”

And Marguerite began to speak.  The words issued from her throat one by one, raucous, with sharp pauses, as though very feeble.

* * * * *

“Pardon, pardon, Big Sister; oh, forgive!  If thou knewest how I have had fear of this moment all my life....”

Suzanne stammered through her tears: 

“Forgive thee what, Little One?  Thou hast given all to me, sacrificed everything; thou art an angel....”