Peggy set her mouth and looked abroad into the brightening night.

Angelique dropped her face in her hands and shook with sobbing.  The three girlish figures, one rigid on the bed, another rigid in the chair, and the third bending in vicarious suffering between them, were made suddenly clear by an illumination of the moon as it began to find the western window.  Wachique had busied herself seeking among piles of furniture for candles, which she considered a necessity for the dead.  The house supply of wax tapers was in the submerged cellar.  So she took the lantern from its nail and set it on the floor at the head of the two pallets, and it threw scattered spots of lustre on Rice’s white forehead and Maria’s hair.  This humble shrouded torch, impertinent as it looked when the lily-white moonlight lay across it, yet reminded beholders of a stable, and a Child born in a stable who had taught the race to turn every sorrow into glory.

The night sent its quiet through the attic, though the bells which had clamored so over the destruction of verdure and homes appeared now to clamor louder over the destruction of youth.

“Do you understand this, Peggy?  They died heretic and unblessed, yet I want to know what they now know until it seems to me I cannot wait.  When I have been playing the harp to tante-gra’mere, and thinking so much, long, long afternoons, such a strange homesickness has grown in me.  I could not make anybody believe it if I told it.  These two have found out what is beyond.  They have found out the great secret.  Oh, Peggy, I do want to know it, also.  There will be an awful mourning over them; and when they go into their little earthen cellars, people will pity that, and say, ‘Poor things.’  But they know the mystery of the ages now, and we know nothing.  Do you think they are yet very far away?  Monsieur Reece?  Mademoiselle?”

Angelique’s low interrogating call, made while she keenly listened with lifted face, had its only response in a mutter from Wachique, who feared any invocation of spirits.  Peggy sat looking straight ahead of her without a word.  She could not wash her face soft with tears, and she felt no reaching out towards disembodiment.  What she wanted was love in this world, and pride in her love; long years of glad living on the verdure of earth in the light of the sun.  One presence could make the common old world celestial enough for her.  She had missed her desire.  But Rice had turned his face to her as he died.

Two boats moved to the eaves and rested there, shaken only by a ripple of the quieting water.  The overflowed rivers would lie calm when the wind allowed it, excepting where a boiling current drove.  The dazed girls yet seemed to dream through the strong indignation and the inquiry and fruitless plans of arriving men.  It was a dream when Captain Saucier sat down and stared haggardly at the two who had perished under his roof, and Colonel Menard stood with his hat over his face.  It was a dream when the brother and sister were lowered and placed on one pallet in a boat.  The hollow of the rafters, the walls on which one might mark with his nail, the waiting black faces, the figures toiling down the roof with those loads,—­were any of these sights real?