They laid him out before the altar in their rude chapel, and prepared for the last funeral rite.
Meanwhile disfigured forms were stealing through the woods, and finding a shelter in various dens and caves, or sleeping round fires kindled in the open or in woodcutters' huts, deserted through fear of them; as yet they had not found the hermit's cave or entered the Happy Valley.
On the morrow Meinhold celebrated the Holy Eucharist, and afterwards performed the burial service with simplest rites; they then committed the body to the earth, and afterwards wandered together, discoursing sweetly on the better life, into the forest, where the twilight was
"Like the Truce of God
With earthly pain and woe."
Never were they happier—never so full of joy and resignation—these two unfortunates, as the world deemed them; bearing about the visible sentence of death on themselves, but they had found the secret of a life Death could not touch.
And in their walk they came suddenly upon a man, who reposed under the shadow of a tree; he seemed asleep, but talked and moaned as if in a feverish dream.
"Father, he is a leper like us, look."
"God has sent him, perhaps, in the place of Evroult."