"I have heard it?" repeated Leonhard, interrogatively.
"Sister Benigna—"
"What is it, sir?" exclaimed Leonhard, starting to his feet.
"She has gone home."
"Good God!" exclaimed Leonhard. "Do you mean to say that she is dead?"
"We call it going home," answered Loretz.
"But gone home! When, why, how did she go?"
"It shocks you," said Loretz, finding perhaps not a little satisfaction in seeing this stranger so moved. He had himself been so horrified by Benigna's silent, unlooked-for departure, and to be shocked and horrified by death was so undesirable and so fought against among good Moravians, that Leonhard's emotion, and much more than emotion, seemed a real solace for the moment. "We don't know how it was," he continued. "My daughter was to go to practice the music with her in the hall after school, and when she went into the school-room she found Sister Benigna sitting at her desk with The Messiah open. But she was gone. We had in Doctor Hummel, and he says it was the heart. He has thought, he says, for a year or so, that there must be some feeble action of the valves. She went to him a twelvemonth since about it, and he told her his opinion; but he told her she might live fifty years yet, though she might go any day. She never mentioned it to us. But Hummel says when he told her she said it was good news. Yet, sir, you never saw a happier creature. You saw her last night and this morning. Well, sir, that's a fair sample—busy all the time, and happy as happy."
"But are you sure that nothing could be done for her?" exclaimed Leonhard, to whom the quiet and calm into which Loretz had talked himself was anything but composing.
"Perfectly sure. If you should look at her once you would see. But I must go back to my women. Will you make yourself at home within? We shall all be back in an hour or so."