she seemed much better, and was already planning several
pleasure trips, when one morning she was found dead in her bed. Her
husband and daughter were overwhelmed, stupefied by this sudden blow,
this cruel treachery of death. The doctor, who belonged to Bartres, had a
family vault in the Lourdes cemetery, a vault constructed at his own
expense, and in which his father and mother already rested. He desired,
therefore, that his wife should be interred there, in a compartment
adjoining that in which he expected soon to lie himself. And after the
burial he had lingered for a week at Lourdes, when Marguerite, who was
with him, was seized with a great shivering, and, taking to her bed one
evening, died two days afterwards without her distracted father being
able to form any exact notion of the illness which had carried her off.
And thus it was not himself, but his daughter, lately radiant with beauty
and health, in the very flower of her youth, who was laid in the vacant
compartment by the mother's side. The man who had been so happy, so
worshipped by his two helpmates, whose heart had been kept so warm by the
love of two dear creatures all his own, was now nothing more than an old,
miserable, stammering, lost being, who shivered in his icy solitude. All
the joy of his life had departed; he envied the men who broke stones upon
the highways when he saw their barefooted wives and daughters bring them
their dinners at noontide. And he had refused to leave Lourdes, he had
relinquished everything, his studies, his practice in Paris, in order
that he might live near the tomb in which his wife and his daughter slept
the eternal sleep.

"Ah, my old friend," repeated Pierre, "how I pitied you! How frightful
must have been your grief! But why did you not rely a little on those who
love you? Why did you shut yourself up here with your sorrow?"

The doctor made a gesture which embraced the horizon. "I could not go
away, they are here and keep me with them. It is all over, I am merely
waiting till my time comes to join them again."

Then silence fell. Birds were fluttering among the shrubs on the bank
behind them, and in front they heard the loud murmur of the Gave. The sun
rays were falling more heavily in a slow, golden dust, upon the
hillsides; but on that retired bench under the beautiful trees, the
coolness was still delightful. And although the crowd was but a couple of
hundred yards distant, they were, so to say, in a desert, for