And there was this cruel aggravation, that on the eve of the
funeral, when the body had been laid in the coffin, it was brought down
into that gallery where they had lunched so merrily while discussing how
magnificently they might decorate it for the two weddings. It was there
that the last funeral watch, the last wake, took place, and there were no
evergreen shrubs, no garlands of foliage, merely four tapers which burnt
there amid a wealth of white roses gathered in the morning, but already
fading. Neither the mother nor the father was willing to go to bed that
night. They remained, side by side, near the child whom mother-earth was
taking back from them. They could see her quite little again, but sixteen
months old, at the time of their first sojourn at Chantebled in the old
tumbledown shooting-box, when she had just been weaned and they were wont
to go and cover her up at nighttime. They saw her also, later on, in
Paris, hastening to them in the morning, climbing up and pulling their
bed to pieces with triumphant laughter. And they saw her yet more
clearly, growing and becoming more beautiful even as Chantebled did, as
if, indeed, she herself bloomed with all the health and beauty of that
now fruitful land.
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