She turned towards the sound with a pitiful vagueness.
"Valmond, O Valmond!" again she cried beseechingly, her clouded eyes straining into the silence.
The cloak dropped from her shoulders, and the loose robe enveloping her fell away from a bosom that throbbed with the passion of a great despair.

Nothing but silence.
She moved to the wall like a little child feeling its way, ran her hand vaguely along it, and touched a crucifix.

With a moan she pressed her lips to the nailed feet, and came on gropingly to the couch.

She reached down towards it, but drew back as if in affright; for a dumb, desolating fear was upon her.
But with that direful courage which is the last gift to the hopeless, she stooped down again, and her fingers touched Valmond's cold hands.
They ran up his breast, to his neck, to his face, and fondled it, as only life can fondle death, out of that pitiful hunger which never can be satisfied in this world; then they moved with an infinite tenderness to his eyes, now blind like hers, and lingered there in the kinship of eternal loss.
A low, anguished cry broke from her: "Valmond--my love!" and she fell forward upon the breast of her lost Napoleon.
When the people gathered again in the little church upon the hill, Valmond and his adventure had become almost a legend, so soon are men and events lost in the distance of death and ruin.
The Cure preached, as he had always done, with a simple, practical solicitude; but towards the end of his brief sermon he paused, and, with a serious tenderness of voice, said: "My children, vanity is the bane of mankind; it destroys as many souls as self-sacrifice saves.

It is the constant temptation of the human heart.