"It is the end," said the doctor to Jacques. "Kiss her for the last time."
Jacques pressed his lips to those of his love. At the last moment they wanted to take away her muff, but she clutched it with her hands.
"No, no," she said, "leave it me; it is winter, it is cold. Oh my poor Jacques! My poor Jacques! What will become of you? Oh heavens!"
And the next day Jacques was alone.
First Reader: I told you that this was not a very lively story.
What would you have, reader? We cannot always laugh.
It was the morning of All Saints. Francine was dead.
Two men were watching at the bedside. One of them standing up was the doctor. The other, kneeling beside the bed, was pressing his lips to the dead girl's hands, and seemed to rivet them there in a despairing kiss. It was Jacques, her lover. For more than six hours he had been plunged in a state of heart broken insensibility. An organ playing under the windows had just roused him from it.
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' 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.