Yet she was no more, and whenever the thought returned
to them that they would never see her again, their hands sought one
another, met in a woful clasp, while from their crushed and mingling
hearts it seemed as if all life, all future, were flowing away to
nihility. Now that a breach had been made, would not every other
happiness be carried off in turn? And though the ten other children were
there, from the little one five years old to the twins who were
four-and-twenty, all clad in black, all gathered in tears around their
sleeping sister, like a sorrow-stricken battalion rendering funeral
honors, neither the father nor the mother saw or counted them: their
hearts were rent by the loss of the daughter who had departed, carrying
away with her some of their own flesh. And in that long bare gallery
which the four candles scarcely lighted, the dawn at last arose upon that
death watch, that last leave-taking.
Then grief again came with the funeral procession, which spread out along
the white road between the lofty poplars and the green corn, that road
over which Rose had galloped so madly through the storm. All the
relations of the Froments, all their friends, all the district, had come
to pay a tribute of emotion at so sudden and swift a death.
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