"If we hurry, Narcisse," he said, "we shall be able to overtake them."
The lad at once placed himself beside him, and together they went on their way towards the gates.
"Do you remember it?" asked the man, softly, as the boy lifted his hat when they passed by the door of the silent, decorated church.
"Yes, perfectly," he said, with a sweet, delicate intonation of voice. "It seems as if my mother must be kneeling there."
Vesper's brow and cheeks immediately became suffused with crimson. "She is probably on ahead. We will find out. If she is not, we shall drive at once to Sleeping Water."
They hurried on silently. The procession was now moving through another gate, this one opening on the point of land where are the ruins of the first church that the good Abbé built on the Bay.
Beside its crumbling ruins and the prostrate altarstones a new, fresh altar had been put up,—this one for temporary use. It was a veritable bower of green amid which bloomed many flowers, the fragile nurslings of the sisters in the adjacent convent.
Before this altar the priests and deacons knelt for an instant on colored rugs, then, while the people gathered closely around them, an Acadien Abbé from the neighboring province of New Brunswick ascended the steps of the altar, and, standing beside the embowered Virgin mother, special patron and protectress of his race, he delivered a fervent panegyric on the ancestors of the men and women before him.
While he recounted the struggles and trials of the early Acadiens, many of his hearers wept silently, but when this second good Abbé eloquently exhorted them not to linger too long on a sad past, but to gird themselves for a glorious future, to be constant to their race and to their religion, their faces cleared,—they were no longer a prey to mournful recollections.