"It is true, monsieur; her mind is troubled at present."
"The cause is some cavalier."
"You judge correctly. Benoit does not wish her to marry as she desires. And though he wishes her to unite herself to a brute compared with her cavalier, yet the latter is himself an individual of no consequence, and she has been well advised to relinquish him."
"Who is it advises that?"
"Her friends, who see in her a more lovely destiny. The dear child will make perhaps a Saint. You do not know the expiations and indulgences she has earned these several years by prayers and devotions, her pure nature, her admirable conduct. She is not for the world, but for God."
"What did Josepthe herself think?"
That which Madame had said of her nature was correct enough. She was a delight to the sisters in their sad, austere lives. "She is like an angel, and has the movements of one," they said. Very unlike to, for instance, the daughters Jalbert, those bold and idle girls, whose steady occupation was tom-boying scandalously with chance young men, and jeering impudent jeers at everybody.
Her haunts were in removed and shady nooks, such as the little dell behind the log cabin of the Le Bruns. There, one hot afternoon he found her sitting under the shade of the windmill, dressed as usual in neat black, and as usual lately, pale. The little ones ran, sat and played around her; Henri, Rudolphe and Elisâ in the pride of their enterprise tugging the long beam by which horse or man in the preceding century had turned the conical cap of the mill; their efforts cracking and shaking the crazy roof, but availing nothing except to disturb a crow or two near by, among the white birches through whose clusters gleamed the River in the sun.
What brought Josephte to the Le Brun dell?
Et quoi! She was weeping.