Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/300

This organ was playing a tune that Francine was in the habit of singing of a morning.

One of those mad hopes that are only born out of deep despair flashed across Jacques’s mind. He went back a month in the past—to the period when Francine was only sick unto death; he forgot the present, and imagined for a moment that the dead girl was but sleeping, and that she would wake up directly, her mouth full of her morning song.

But the sounds of the organ had not yet died away before Jacques had already come back to the reality. Francine’s mouth was eternally closed to all songs, and the smile that her last thought had brought to her lips was fading away from them beneath death’s fingers.

“Take courage, Jacques,” said the doctor, who was the sculptor’s friend.

Jacques rose, and said, looking fixedly at him, “It is over, is it not—there is no longer any hope?”

Without replying to this wild inquiry, Jacques’s friend went and drew the curtains of the bed, and then, returning to the sculptor, held out his hand.

“Francine is dead,” said he; “we were bound to expect it, though heaven knows that we have done what we could to save her. She was a good girl, Jacques, who loved you very dearly—dearer and better than you loved her yourself, for hers was love alone, whilst yours held an alloy. Francine is dead, but all is not yet over; we must now think about the steps necessary for her burial. We will set about that together, and we will ask one of the neighbors to keep watch here whilst we are away.”

Jacques allowed himself to be led away by his friend. They passed the day between the registrar of deaths, the undertaker and the cemetery. As Jacques had no money, the doctor pawned his watch, a ring, and some clothes, to