won't wait for you. You owe it to your children and to us, who want to
have everything go right in the house, to marry as soon as possible."

"Well, father," the son-in-law replied, "if you really want me to do it,
I must gratify you. But I don't propose to conceal from you that it will
cause me a great deal of annoyance, and that I'd about as lief drown
myself. You know what you've lost, and you don't know what you may
find. I had an excellent wife, a good-looking wife, sweet and brave,
good to her father and mother, good to her husband, good to her
children, a good worker, in the fields or in the house, clever about her
work, good at everything, in fact; and when you gave her to me, when I
took her, it wasn't one of the conditions that I should forget her if I
had the bad luck to lose her."

"What you say shows a good heart, Germain," rejoined Père Maurice; "I
know you loved my daughter, that you made her happy, and that if you
could have satisfied Death by going in her place, Catherine would be
alive at this moment and you in the cemetery. She well deserved to have
you love her like that, and if you don't get over her loss, no more do
we. But I'm not talking about forgetting her. The good God willed that
she should leave us, and we don't let a day pass without showing Him, by
our prayers, our thoughts, our words, our acts, that we respect her
memory and are grieved at her departure. But if she could speak to you
from the other world and tell you her will, she would bid you seek a
mother for her little orphans. The question, then, is to find a woman
worthy to take her place. It won't be very easy; but it isn't
impossible; and when we have found her for you, you will love her as you
loved my daughter, because you are an honest man and because you will be
grateful to her for doing us a service and loving your children."