The Confession

Marguerite de Thérelles was dying. Although but fifty-six, she seemed
like seventy-five at least. She panted, paler than the sheets, shaken
by dreadful shiverings, her face convulsed, her eyes haggard, as if she
had seen some horrible thing.

Her eldest sister, Suzanne, six years older, sobbed on her knees beside
the bed. A little table drawn close to the couch of the dying woman,
and covered with a napkin, bore two lighted candles, the priest being
momentarily expected to give extreme unction and the communion, which
should be the last.

The apartment had that sinister aspect, that air of hopeless farewells,
which belongs to the chambers of the dying. Medicine bottles stood
about on the furniture, linen lay in the corners, pushed aside by foot
or broom. The disordered chairs themselves seemed affrighted, as if
they had run, in all the senses of the word. Death, the formidable, was
there, hidden, waiting.

The story of the two sisters was very touching. It was quoted far and
wide; it had made many eyes to weep.

Suzanne, the elder, had once been madly in love with a young man, who
had also been in love with her. They were engaged, and were only
waiting the day fixed for the contract, when Henry de Lampierre
suddenly died.

The despair of the young girl was dreadful, and she vowed that she
would never marry. She kept her word. She put on widow's weeds, which
she never took off.

Then her sister, her little sister Marguérite, who was only twelve
years old, came one morning to throw herself into the arms of the
elder, and said: "Big Sister, I do not want thee to be unhappy. I do
not want thee to cry all thy life. I will never leave thee, never,
never! I--I, too, shall never marry. I shall stay with thee always,
always, always!"

Suzanne, touched by the devotion of the child, kissed her, but did not
believe.

Yet the little one, also, kept her word, and despite the entreaties of
her parents, despite the supplications of the elder, she never married.
She was pretty, very pretty; she refused many a young man who seemed to
love her truly; and she never left her sister more.

* * * * *

They lived together all the days of their life, without ever being
separated a single time. They went side by side, inseparably united.
But Marguérite seemed always sad, oppressed, more melancholy than the
elder, as though perhaps her sublime sacrifice had broken her spirit.
She aged more quickly, had white hair from the age of thirty, and often
suffering, seemed afflicted by some secret, gnawing trouble.

Now she was to be the first to die.

Since yesterday she was no longer able to speak. She had only said, at
the first