"Noémi crosses herself, but does not say anything, for she knows it is a time to keep still.
"'And perhaps,' says the old woman then, in a voice of the most piteous, as if someone were giving her a pinch, 'and perhaps, if only I had it, a dollar or two to help buy some medicine and a pair of shoes for that Évangéline.... But no, I do not think we have so much as that anywhere in the house.'
"Now was not that like the old serpent, to be telling a lie even at the last; and surely if God had struck her dead by a ball of lightning at that moment it would have been none too good for her. But no, he was going to give her a chance to repent and not to have to go to Hell for a punishment. So what do you think He made happen then?
"Hardly had those abominable words jumped out of her when with a great crash, down off the top shelf comes that sugar bowl (if it was a sugar bowl), and as it hits the floor, it breaks into a thousand pieces; and there, in a little pile, are those thirteen dollars, just as on the day when that poor Benoît had been carrying them with him to Port l'Évêque.
"Now just as if they are not doing it at all of their own wish, but something makes them act that way, all of a sudden those four Bucherons are kneeling on the floor, saying their prayers in a strange voice like the prayers you might hear in a tomb; and with that, the chair goes back quietly to its four legs, and the noise ceases on the roof, and those two cupboard doors draw shut without human hands. As for Noémi, she grabs up the money, and out she goes, swift as a bird that is carrying a worm to its children, leaving her parents by marriage still there on their knees, like so many images; but as she opens the door she says:
"'May the good God have pity on all the four of you!'—which was a Christian thing to say, seeing how much she had suffered at their hands.
"Well, there is not much more to tell. Noémi got through the rest of that winter without any more trouble; and the next year she married a fisherman from Little Anse, and went away from the Cape. As for the Bucherons, they were not like the same people any more. You would not have known them—so pious they were and charitable, though always, perhaps, a little strange in their ways. But when the old woman died, two years later, or three, all the people of Pig Cove and Gros Nez followed the corpse in to Port l'Évêque; and her grave is there in the cemetery.
"The rest of the family are gone now too, as you see; and soon, I suppose, there will not be many left, even out here on the Cape, who know all about what happened to the Bucherons, because of their hard hearts; which is a pity, seeing that the story has such a good lesson to it...."