In all the soft tenderness of girlhood the two sisters lamented their absconding brother. They, too, had been unkind to him. The sweet, patient smile that ever met their taunts, the mild reproof when they concealed his beads or prayer-book, his willingness to oblige on all occasions, were remembered with tears. When sitting by the mother's bed, the conversation invariably turned on Louis. In cruel fancy they deepened the real sorrow of separation by casting imaginary misfortunes on the track of the absent boy. One would sigh with the ominous PERHAPS. "Poor Louis is now hungry!" "Perhaps he is now lying sick and footsore on the side of some highway, without a friend, without money." "Perhaps he has fallen in with robbers and is stripped of the few articles of dress he took with him." "Perhaps he is now sorry for leaving us," sighed the tender-hearted Aloysia, "and would give the world to kiss again his poor sick mamma!" But futile tears flowed with each surmise. No welcome messenger returned to bring tidings of the missing youth. 'Tis thus we love virtue; we sigh over departed worth when its brilliancy has faded from our sight. Chapter VIII. Madeleine's Happy Death. Troubles, like migratory birds, never travel alone. As heavier billows cling together and roll in rapid succession and in thundering force on the rock-built barriers of nature, so the waves of trial and misfortune break on frail humanity in crushing proximity. The second and third billows of misfortune are fast undulating on the tide of time, and will sweep over the home of Cassier, leaving it a miserable wreck, a theme for the sympathy and the moral of a historian's pen. The weakened, consumptive frame of Madeleine did not long survive the blow that Louis had prepared for her--not, indeed, in the sense of a guilty and blood-stained hand, but with the merit of an Abraham who, at the command of Heaven, prepared a funeral pyre for his child. Madeleine could scarcely weep; the grief of nature was calmed by the impulses of grace, and she felt in her heart a holy joy in the sublime destinies of her son. Could we, in the face of the holy teachings of the Church, institute a comparison between the mother of the soldier and the mother of a priest? Amidst sighs that were but the convulsive throes of a heart's emotion, she breathed often and aloud the "Deo gratias" of the faithful soul. But like certain forces in nature that require but the slightest shock to give them irresistible power, by which they burst through their confining cells and set themselves free, the immortal spirit of Madeleine burst its prison cell and soared to its home beyond the skies.