"My noble Pierre!" replied she, putting out her arms towards him.
"Why might not God have suffered me to reward such divine goodness?
Thanks, my love! I now die content with all things but parting with you." She held him fast by his hands, one of which she kept pressed to her lips. They all looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to speak again, for her eyes were wide open and fixed with a look of ineffable love upon the face of Pierre, looking like life, after life was fled. She still held him in her rigid clasp, but she moved not. Upon her pale lips a smile seemed to hover. It was but the shadow left behind of her retreating soul. Amelie de Repentigny was dead! The angel of death had kissed her lovingly, and unnoticed of any she had passed with him away.
The watchful eye of the Lady de Tilly was the first to see that Amelie's breath had gone so quietly that no one caught her latest sigh. The physician and chaplain rushed hurriedly into the chamber, but too late. The great physician of souls had already put his beloved to sleep,--the blessed sleep, whose dream is of love on earth, and whose waking is in heaven. The great high priest of the sons and daughters of men had anointed her with the oil of his mercy, and sent his blessed angels to lead her to the mansions of everlasting rest.
The stroke fell like the stunning blow of a hammer upon the heart of Pierre. He had, indeed, foreseen her death, but tried in vain to realize it. He made no outcry, but sat still, wrapped in a terrible silence as in the midst of a desert. He held fast her dead hands, and gazed upon her dead face until the heart-breaking sobs of Heloise, and the appeals of Mere Esther, roused him from his stupor.
He rose up, and, lifting Amelie in his arms, laid her upon a couch tenderly and reverently, as a man touches the holiest object of his religion. Amelie was to him a sacrament, and in his manly love he worshipped her more as a saint than as a woman, a creation of heavenly more than of earthly perfections.
Pierre bent over her and closed for the last time those dear eyes which had looked upon him so pure and so lovingly. He embraced her dead form, and kissed those pallid lips which had once confessed her unalterable love and truth for Pierre Philibert.
The agitated nuns gathered round them at the news of death in the Convent. They looked wonderingly and earnestly at an exhibition of such absorbing affection, and were for the most part in tears. With some of these gentle women this picture of true love, broken in the midst of its brightest hopes, woke sympathies and recollections which the watchful eye of Mere Migeon promptly checked as soon as she came into the parlor.
The Lady Superior saw that all was over, and that Pierre's presence was an uneasiness to the nuns, who glanced at him with eyes of pity and womanly sympathy. She took him kindly by the hand, with a few words of condolence, and intimated that, as he had been permitted to see the end, he must now withdraw from those forbidden precincts and leave his lost treasure to the care of the nuns who take charge of the dead.