The other, kneeling beside the bed, was pressing his lips to the dead girl's hands, and seemed to rivet them there in a despairing kiss.
It was Jacques, her lover.

For more than six hours he had been plunged in a state of heart broken insensibility.

An organ playing under the windows had just roused him from it.
This organ was playing a tune that Francine was in the habit of singing of a morning.
One of those mad hopes that are only born out of deep despair flashed across Jacques' mind.

He went back a month in the past--to the period when Francine was only sick unto death; he forgot the present, and imagined for a moment that the dead girl was but sleeping, and that she would wake up directly, her mouth full of her morning song.
But the sounds of the organ had not yet died away before Jacques had already come back to the reality.

Francine's mouth was eternally closed to all songs, and the smile that her last thought had brought to her lips was fading away from them beneath death's fingers.
"Take courage, Jacques," said the doctor, who was the sculptor's friend.
Jacques rose, and said, looking fixedly at him, "it is over, is it not--there is no longer any hope ?" Without replying to this wild inquiry, Jacques' friend went and drew the curtains of the bed, and then, returning to the sculptor, held out his hand.
"Francine is dead," said he.