"This cabin is yours, stay here; I ask you only to take care of the fig-tree that shades my mother's tomb, and these poor creatures who have been my only companions so long." The old man readily understood her; but, although the hovel was a palace in his eyes, and Sister Anne's cession of it to him made him richer than he had ever been, he tried to induce the girl to abandon a plan which seemed to him insane. "Where do you propose to go, my child?" he asked; "can you think of leaving home in the condition you are in? Within two months you will be a mother, and you propose to go on a journey; and you a poor, dumb girl! Who will take you in, who will help you, how will you ask the way? Come, my girl, you are going to do a very foolish thing. Wait a little while, at least." But Sister Anne had made up her mind, and nothing could move her; she shook her head as she looked at the old shepherd; then raised her eyes to heaven, as if to say: "God will take pity on me and guide my steps." He tried once more to keep her. "What about money?" he said; "you need money in the world, my girl; I know that, although I haven't lived much in the world. I haven't got any myself, and I can't give you anything for your house and what there is in it, although it's well worth something." Sister Anne smiled, then took from her bosom a small canvas bag, and showed the old man four gold pieces: it was Marguerite's little hoard. Some time before she died, the good woman had told her to look in the corner of the cabin, under her bed; there she had found the little bag securely tied, and Marguerite had said to her: "Take it, my child; it's for you; it's the fruit of my savings in sixty years of toil. I have always meant it for you; perhaps it will help you to buy some more goats." At sight of the four gold pieces, the old shepherd ceased his efforts to detain her, for he believed that with that amount of money she could go round the world. "Go, my child," he said; "I will keep your cabin; remember that it still belongs to you, if ever you want to come back to it." Sister Anne smiled sadly; then, with a last glance at her home, she went forth, with her light bundle in one hand, and in the other a stick on which she leaned as she walked. She saluted Marguerite's grave in the garden; her goats ran after her, as if they expected her to drive them to the hill as usual. She caressed them, weeping, for they had come to be her only friends, and something told her that she would never see them again. What memories stirred her heart as she walked through the woods! There was the place where they had sat so often! yonder the brook, by which she first saw him, and where he told her that he loved her! Those familiar spots seemed alive with his presence, and she found it hard to make up her mind to leave them. But she said to herself, to sustain her courage: "I am going to join him; and perhaps we shall return together."