The services went on.  Veronique, lying on the bed, followed them with a look of such inward contentment that she seemed, to every eye, no longer the same woman.  On her face was the candid and virtuous expression of the pure young girl such as she had been in her parents’ home.  The dawn of eternal life was already whitening her brow and glorifying her face with its celestial tints.  Doubtless she heard the mystic harmonies, and gathered strength to live from her desire to unite herself once more with God in the last communion.  The rector came beside the bed and gave her absolution.  The archbishop administered the sacred oils with a fatherly tenderness that showed to all there present how dear the lost but now recovered lamb had been to him.  Then, with the sacred anointing, he closed to the things of earth those eyes which had done such evil, and laid the seal of the Church upon the lips that were once too eloquent.  The ears, by which so many evil inspirations had penetrated her mind, were closed forever.  All the senses, deadened by repentance, were thus sanctified, and the spirit of evil could have no further power within her soul.

Never did assistants of this ceremony more fully understand the grandeur and profundity of the sacrament than those who now saw the acts of the Church justly following the confession of that dying woman.

Thus prepared, Veronique received the body of Jesus Christ with an expression of hope and joy which melted the ice of unbelief against which the rector had so often bruised himself.  Roubaud, confounded in all his opinions, became a Catholic on the spot.  The scene was touching and yet awesome; the solemnity of its every feature was so great that painters might have found there the subject of a masterpiece.

When this funeral part was over, and the dying woman heard the priests begin the reading of the gospel of Saint John, she signed to her mother to bring her son, who had been taken from the room by his tutor.  When she saw Francis kneeling by the bedside the pardoned mother felt she had the right to lay her hand upon his head and bless him.  Doing so, she died.

Old Madame Sauviat was there, at her post, erect as she had been for twenty years.  This woman, heroic after her fashion, closed her daughter’s eyes—­those eyes that had wept so much—­and kissed them.  All the priests, followed by the choristers, surrounded the bed.  By the flaming light of the torches they chanted the terrible De Profundis, the echoes of which told the population kneeling before the chateau, the friends praying in the salon, the servants in the adjoining rooms, that the mother of the canton was dead.  The hymn was accompanied with moans and tears.  The confession of that grand woman had not been audible beyond the threshold of the salon, and none but loving ears had heard it.

When the peasants of the neighborhood, joining with those of Montegnac, came, one by one, to lay upon their benefactress the customary palm, together with their last farewell mingled with prayers and tears, they saw the man of justice, crushed by grief, holding the hand of the woman whom, without intending it, he had so cruelly but so justly stricken.