THE DEVIL'S POOL
you really wish it, I must do as you say. But I do not wish to hide it from you that it will make me very sad, and that I hardly wish tor anything but to drown myself. We know who it is we lose, we never know whom we find. I had a good wife, a pretty wife, sweet, brave, good to her father and mother, good to her husband, good to her children, good to toil in the fields and in the house, well fitted to work,—in short, good for everything; and when you had given her to me, and I took her, we did not place it among our promises that I should go and forget about her if I had the misfortune to lose her."
"What you say shows your good heart, Germain," answered Father Maurice. "I know that you loved my daughter and that you made her happy, and that had you been able to satisfy Death by going in her place, Catherine would be alive today, and you would be in the graveyard. She deserved all your love, and if you are not consoled, neither are we. But I do not speak to you of forgetting her. God wished her to leave us, and we do not let a day go by without telling him in our prayers and thoughts, and words and actions, that we keep her memory and still sorrow for her loss.
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