Indeed, at this moment, Gabriel entered the open space at the end of the
room. "Heaven! what do I see?" cried the young priest. "The daughters of
Marshal Simon!"

And, rushing forward, he received the sisters in his arms, for they were
no longer able to stand. Already their drooping heads, their half-closed
eyes, their painful and difficult breathing, announced the approach of
death. Sister Martha was close at hand. She hastened to respond to the
call of Gabriel. Aided by this pious woman, he was able to lift the
orphans upon a bed reserved for the doctor in attendance. For fear that
the sight of this mournful agony should make too deep an impression on
the other patients, Sister Martha drew a large curtain, and the sisters
were thus in some sort walled off from the rest of the room. Their hands
had been so tightly clasped together, during a nervous paroxysm, that it
was impossible to separate them. It was in this position that the first
remedies were applied--remedies incapable of conquering the violence of
the disease, but which at least mitigated for a few moments the excessive
pains they suffered, and restored some faint glimmer of perception to
their obscured and troubled senses. At this moment, Gabriel was leaning
over the bed with a look of inexpressible grief. With breaking heart, and
face bathed in tears, he thought of the strange destiny, which thus made
him a witness of the death of these girls, his relations, whom but a few
months before he had rescued from the horrors of the tempest. In spite of
his firmness of soul, the missionary could not help shuddering as he
reflected on the fate of the orphans, the death of Jacques Rennepont, and
the fearful devices by which M. Hardy, retired to the cloistered solitude
of St. Herein, had become a member of the Society of Jesus almost in
dying. The missionary said to himself, that already four members of the
Rennepont family--his family--had been successively struck down by some