“Alone.”
That voice, devoid of emphasis, yet perfectly intelligible, had something glacial about it; it was like an echo from another world.
“Go, mother,” said Roland. “You see that she wishes to be alone with me.”
“O my God!” murmured Madame de Montrevel, “can there still be hope?”
Low as these words were, the dying girl heard them.
“No, mother,” she said. “God has permitted me to see my brother again; but to-night I go to Him.”
Madame de Montrevel groaned.
“Roland, Roland!” she said, “she is there already.”
Roland signed to her to leave them alone, and she went away with little Edouard. Roland closed the door, and returned to his sister’s bedside with unutterable emotion.
Her body was already stiffening in death; the breath from her lips would scarcely have dimmed a mirror; the eyes only, wide-open, were fixed and brilliant, as though the whole remaining life of the body, dead before its time, were centred, there. Roland had heard of this strange state called ecstasy, which is nothing else than catalepsy. He saw that Amélie was a victim of that preliminary death.