There was a feeble smile upon itthe smile with which her last words had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"
She was quite dead.
CHAPTER VI
All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.
The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.
She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors and plains; it is a common fate.