n a cry of amazement and horror from all around, the arm of
the under man lifted out over the back of the other, a downward flash
of steel--another--and another! the long, subsiding wail of a strong
man's sudden despair, the voice of one crying,--

"Zosephine! Ah! Zosephine! _ma vieille! ma vieille!_"--one long moan
and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest
soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead.

Poor old Sosthene and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for
weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain. Day and night she
put them away in fierce grief and silence, or if she spoke wailed
always the one implacable answer,--

"I want my husband!" And to the cure the same words,--

"Go tell God I want my husband!"

But when at last came one who, having come to speak, could only hold
her hand in his and silently weep with her, she clung to his with both
her own, and looking up into his young, thin face, cried,--not with
grace of words, and yet with some grace in all her words' Acadian
ruggedness,--

"Bonaventure! Ah! Bonaventure! thou who knowest the way--teach me, my
brother, how to be patient."

And so--though the ex-governor had just offered him a mission in
another part of the Acadians' land, a mission, as he thought, far
beyond his deserving, though, in fact, so humble that to tell you what
it was would force your smile--he staid.

A year went by, and then another. Zosephine no longer lifted to heaven
a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and
his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed
impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of
which he was so fond he put forward--though ever so impersonally and
counting himself least of all to have attained--the precepts of
self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with
a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the lip, she would
slowly shake her head and say:

"It is of no use; I can't do it! I may be too young--I may be too bad,
but--I can't learn it!"

At last, one September evening, Bonaventure stood at the edge of
Sosthene's galerie, whither Zosephine had followed out, leaving _le
vieux_ and _la vieille_ in the house. On the morrow Bonaventure was
to leave Carancro. And now he said,--

"Zosephine, I must go."

"Ah, Bonaventure!" she replied, "my children--what will my children
do? It is not only that yo