ert one day as he met her sitting in
the shades of the pine-walk reading a devotional work.

Madame was a figure still able to command as well as to attract respect.
Dignity and ability had not yet departed from her face and bearing, and
quietude was the only effect of age upon her, beyond falling cheeks and
increasing absorption in exercises of religion.

"Does it not appear to you that your demoiselle is sad?" he asked.

"It is true, monsieur; her mind is troubled at present."

"The cause is some cavalier."

"You judge correctly. Benoit does not wish her to marry as she desires.
And though he wishes her to unite herself to a brute compared with her
cavalier, yet the latter is himself an individual of no consequence, and
she has been well advised to relinquish him."

"Who is it advises that?"

"Her friends, who see in her a more lovely destiny. The dear child will
make perhaps a Saint. You do not know the expiations and indulgences she
has earned these several years by prayers and devotions, her pure
nature, her admirable conduct. She is not for the world, but for God."

"What did Josepthe herself think?"

That which Madame had said of her nature was correct enough. She was a
delight to the sisters in their sad, austere lives. "She is like an
angel, and has the movements of one," they said. Very unlike to, for
instance, the daughters Jalbert, those bold and idle girls, whose steady
occupation was tom-boying scandalously with chance young men, and
jeering impudent jeers at everybody.

Her haunts were in removed and shady nooks, such as the little dell
behind the log cabin of the Le Bruns. There, one hot afternoon he found
her sitting under the shade of the windmill, dressed as usual in neat
black, and as usual lately, pale. The little ones ran, sat and played
around her; Henri, Rudolphe and Elisa in the pride of their enterprise
tugging the long beam by which horse or man in the preceding century had
turned the conical cap of the mill; their efforts cracking and shaking
the crazy roof, but availing nothing except to disturb a crow or two
near by, among the white birches through whose clusters gleamed the
River in the sun.

What brought Josephte to the Le Brun dell?

_Et quoi!_ She was weeping.

Those little children saw not her silent tears. Chrysler beheld
them--crystalline drops on pale, soft cheek, emblems of pure heart and
secret sorrow; but she checked them when he drew near and sat up
composed.