always, always!"

Suzanne, touched by the devotion of the child, kissed her, but did not
believe.

Yet the little one, also, kept her word, and despite the entreaties of
her parents, despite the supplications of the elder, she never married.
She was pretty, very pretty; she refused many a young man who seemed to
love her truly; and she never left her sister more.

* * * * *

They lived together all the days of their life, without ever being
separated a single time. They went side by side, inseparably united.
But Marguérite seemed always sad, oppressed, more melancholy than the
elder, as though perhaps her sublime sacrifice had broken her spirit.
She aged more quickly, had white hair from the age of thirty, and often
suffering, seemed afflicted by some secret, gnawing trouble.

Now she was to be the first to die.

Since yesterday she was no longer able to speak. She had only said, at
the first glimmers of day-dawn:

"Go fetch Monsieur le Curé, the moment has come."

And she had remained since then upon her back, shaken with spasms, her
lips agitated as though dreadful words were mounting from her heart
without power of issue, her look mad with fear, terrible to see.