All this was said in a hard but resolute tone.

A ring of the bell interrupted them.  It was the express wagon.

“See that they do not take what does not belong to us,” Phillis said.  “While they fill their wagon I will write in the parlor.”

At the end of an hour the wagon was ready.  Madame Cormier entered the parlor to tell her daughter.

“I have finished,” Phillis said.

Having placed her letter in an envelope, she laid it in full view on Saniel’s desk.

“Now let us go,” she said.

And as her mother sighed, while walking with difficulty

“Lean on me, dear mamma, you know I am strong.”

CHAPTER XLIV

AFTER LONG YEARS

Saniel did not return until quite late in the afternoon.  When he opened the door with his key he was surprised at not seeing his wife run to him and kiss him.

“She is painting,” he said to himself, “she did not hear me.”

He passed into the parlor, convinced that he would find her at her easel; but he did not see her, and the easel was not in its usual place, there nor anywhere else.

He knocked at the door of Madame Cormier’s room; there was no reply; he knocked louder a second time, and after waiting a moment he entered.  The room was empty; there was no bed, no furniture, no one.

Stupefied, he looked around him, then returning to the vestibule he called:  “Phillis!  Phillis!”

There was no reply.  He ran to the kitchen, no one was there; he went into his office, no one there.  But as he looked about him, he saw Phillis’s letter on his desk, and his heart leaped; he grasped it eagerly, and opened it with a trembling hand.  It was as follows: 

“I have gone, never to return.  My despair and disgust of life are such, that without my mother and the poor being who is so far away, I should kill myself; but in spite of the horror of my position I was obliged to reflect, and I do not wish to aggravate by folly the wickedness that is going on about me.  My mother is no longer young; she is ill and has suffered cruelly.  Not only do I owe it to her to brighten her old age by my presence, by the material and moral support that I can give her, but she must have faith that I am there to replace her, and to open my arms to her son, to my brother.  The least that I can do for them is to wait courageously for him; and, however weary, terrible, or frightful my life may be hereafter, I shall bear it so that the unfortunate, the pariah, whom a pitiless fate has pursued, will find on his return a hearth, a home, a friend.  This will be my only object, my reason for living; and in order to save myself from sluggishness and weariness, my thoughts will always be on the time when he will return, he whom I will call my child, and whom my love must save and cure.  I know that long years separate me from that day, and that until