“Pray for her,” he said to the priest.  “And you will bury her in the old cemetery.  It was her last request.”

He went out, and the priest sank on his knees and mumbled his prayers for the dead.  But his eyes wandered to the high narrow windows through which the countess had stared for hours and days, stared at the fishermen sailing north for the grande peche, followed along the shore of the river by wives and mothers, until their boats were caught in the great waves of the ocean beyond; often at naught more animate than the dark flood, the wooded banks, the ruins, the rain driving like needles through the water.  The priest had eaten nothing since his meagre breakfast at twelve the day before, and his imagination was active.  He wondered if the soul up there rejoiced in the death of the beautiful restless body, the passionate brooding mind.  He could not see her face from where he knelt, only the waxen hands clasping a crucifix.  He wondered if the face were peaceful in death, or peevish and angry as when he had seen it last.  If the great change had smoothed and sealed it, then perhaps the soul would sink deep under the dark waters, grateful for oblivion, and that cursed train could not awaken it for years to come.  Curiosity succeeded wonder.  He cut his prayers short, got to his weary swollen feet and pushed a chair to the bed.  He mounted it and his face was close to the dead woman’s.  Alas! it was not peaceful.  It was stamped with the tragedy of a bitter renunciation.  After all, she had been young, and at the last had died unwillingly.  There was still a fierce tenseness about the nostrils, and her upper lip was curled as if her last word had been an imprecation.  But she was very beautiful, despite the emaciation of her features.  Her black hair nearly covered the bed, and her lashes looked too heavy for the sunken cheeks.

“Pauvre petite!” thought the priest.  “No, she will not rest, nor would she wish to.  I will not sprinkle holy-water on her grave.  It is wondrous that monster can give comfort to any one, but if he can, so be it.”

He went into the little oratory adjoining the bedroom and prayed more fervently.  But when the watchers came an hour later they found him in a stupor, huddled at the foot of the altar.

When he awoke he was in his own bed in his little house beside the church.  But it was four days before they would let him rise to go about his duties, and by that time the countess was in her grave.

The old housekeeper left him to take care of himself.  He waited eagerly for the night.  It was raining thinly, a gray quiet rain that blurred the landscape and soaked the ground in the Bois d’Amour.  It was wet about the graves, too; but the priest had given little heed to the elements in his long life of crucified self, and as he heard the remote echo of the evening train he hastened out with his holy-water and had sprinkled every grave but one when the train sped by.