“Oh, no, no! I am not impious,” she cried, dropping upon her knees--all the English part in her, all her reason and self-restraint broken down by extreme emotion. “The bon Dieu knows I am not! I know, I know He does, and sees me, the good Father, and is sorry, and considers with Himself in His great heart if He will do it even yet. Oh, I know, I know!” cried the weeping girl, “some must die, and He considers long; but tell me He does not see me, does not hear me, is not sorry for me--how is He then my Father? No!” she said softly, rising from her knees and drying the tears from her face, “what I feel is that He is thinking it over again.” Madame de Mirfleur was half afraid of her daughter, thinking she was going out of her mind. She laid her hand on Reine’s shoulder with a soothing touch. “Chérie!” she said, “don’t you know it was all decided and settled before you were born, from the beginning of the world?” “Hush!” said Reine, in her excitement. “I can feel it even in the air. If our eyes were clear enough, we should see the angels waiting to know. I dare not pray any more, only to wait like the angels. He is considering. Oh! pray, pray!” the poor child cried, feverish and impassioned. She went out into the balcony and knelt down there, leaning her forehead against the wooden railing. The sky shone above with a thousand stars, the moon, which was late that night, had begun to throw upward from behind the pinnacles of snow, a rising whiteness, which made them gleam; the waterfall murmured softly in the silence; the pines joined in their continual cadence, and sent their aromatic odors like a breath of healing, in soft waves toward the sick man’s chamber. There was a stillness all about, as if, as poor Reine said, God himself was considering, weighing the balance of death or life. She did not look at the wonderful landscape around, or see or even feel its beauty. Her mind was too much absorbed--not praying, as she said, but fixed in one wonderful voiceless aspiration. This fervor and height of feeling died away after a time, and poor little Reine came back to common life, trembling with a thrill in all her nerves, and chilled with over-emotion, but yet calm, having got some strange gleam of encouragement, as she thought, from the soft air and the starry skies. “He is fast asleep,” she said to her mother when they parted for the night, with such a smile on her face as only comes after many tears, and the excitement of great suffering, “quite fast asleep, breathing like a child. He has not slept so before, almost for years.”