He held fast her dead hands,
and gazed upon her dead face until the heart-breaking sobs of
Heloise, and the appeals of Mere Esther, roused him from his stupor.
He rose up, and, lifting Amelie in his arms, laid her upon a couch
tenderly and reverently, as a man touches the holiest object of his
religion. Amelie was to him a sacrament, and in his manly love he
worshipped her more as a saint than as a woman, a creation of
heavenly more than of earthly perfections.
Pierre bent over her and closed for the last time those dear eyes
which had looked upon him so pure and so lovingly. He embraced her
dead form, and kissed those pallid lips which had once confessed her
unalterable love and truth for Pierre Philibert.
The agitated nuns gathered round them at the news of death in the
Convent. They looked wonderingly and earnestly at an exhibition of
such absorbing affection, and were for the most part in tears. With
some of these gentle women this picture of true love, broken in the
midst of its brightest hopes, woke sympathies and recollections
which the watchful eye of Mere Migeon promptly checked as soon as
she came into the parlor.
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