The Abbe Dominis and I spoke in signs, communicating to each other our mutual ideas.  Yes, the angels were watching her! yes, their flaming swords shone above that noble brow, which the august expression of her virtue made, as it were, a visible soul conversing with the spirits of its sphere.  The lines of her face cleared; all in her was exalted and became majestic beneath the unseen incense of the seraphs who guarded her.  The green tints of bodily suffering gave place to pure white tones, the cold wan pallor of approaching death.  Jacques and Madeleine entered.  Madeleine made us quiver by the adoring impulse which flung her on her knees beside the bed, crying out, with clasped hand:  “My mother! here is my mother!” Jacques smiled; he knew he would follow her where she went.

“She is entering the haven,” said the Abbe Birotteau.

The Abbe Dominis looked at me as if to say:  “Did I not tell you the star would rise in all its glory?”

Madeleine knelt with her eyes fixed on her mother, breathing when she breathed, listening to the soft breath, the last thread by which she held to life, and which we followed in terror, fearing that every effort of respiration might be the last.  Like an angel at the gates of the sanctuary, the young girl was eager yet calm, strong but reverent.  At that moment the Angelus rang from the village clock-tower.  Waves of tempered air brought its reverberations to remind us that this was the sacred hour when Christianity repeats the words said by the angel to the woman who has redeemed the faults of her sex.  “Ave Maria!” —­surely, at this moment the words were a salutation from heaven.  The prophecy was so plain, the event so near that we burst into tears.  The murmuring sounds of evening, melodious breezes in the leafage, last warbling of the birds, the hum and echo of the insects, the voices of the waters, the plaintive cry of the tree-frog,—­all country things were bidding farewell to the loveliest lily of the valley, to her simple, rural life.  The religious poesy of the hour, now added to that of Nature, expressed so vividly the psalm of the departing soul that our sobs redoubled.

Though the door of the chamber was open we were all so plunged in contemplation of the scene, as if to imprint its memories forever on our souls, that we did not notice the family servants who were kneeling as a group and praying fervently.  These poor people, living on hope, had believed their mistress might be spared, and this plain warning overcame them.  At a sign from the Abbe Birotteau the old huntsman went to fetch the curate of Sache.  The doctor, standing by the bed, calm as science, and holding the hand of the still sleeping woman, had made the confessor a sign to say that this sleep was the only hour without pain which remained for the recalled angel.  The moment had come to administer the last sacraments of the Church.  At nine o’clock she awoke quietly, looked at us with surprised but gentle eyes, and we beheld our idol once more in all the beauty of former days.