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Updated: June 17, 2025
When the moon came up she was at the window, and still it continued, so faint, so sweet, that answer to her song. Echo never did anything more exquisite, but she knew nothing of such a heathen as Echo. Human nature became exhausted. She fell asleep where she was, in the window, and dreamed as only a bride can dream of her groom. When she awoke, "Adorine!
The little bed-chamber, with its high mattressed bed, covered with the Acadian home-spun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its bit of mirror over the bureau, the bottle of perfumed grease to keep the locks black and glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms hanging on the wall, the low, black polished spinning-wheel, the loom, the métier d' Adorine famed throughout the parish, the ever goodly store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging from the ceiling, and the little square, open window which looked under the mossy oak-branches to look over the prairie; and once again all blue and white lilies they were all there, as Adorine was there; but there was more not there.
But the sun came, and the sun is not created, like the moon, for lovers, and whatever happened in the night, there was work to be done in the day. Adorine worked like one in a trance, her face as radiant as the upturned face of a saint. They did not know what it was, or rather they thought it was love. Love is so different out there, they make all kinds of allowances for it.
But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other, so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of her looking and thinking and longing.
Her lips, her hands, her slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and feet which should have doubled their single life. That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise the most industrious Acadian and the best cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been short, her story.
But, in truth, Adorine was still hearing her celestial voices or voice. If the cackling of the chickens, the whir of the spinning-wheel, or the "bum bum" of the loom effaced it a moment, she had only to go to some still place, round her hand over her ear, and give the line of a song, and it was Zepherin Zepherin she heard. She walked in a dream until night.
The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft bank, and Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found until the summer drought had bared the swamp. There was a little girl in the house when we arrived all else were in the field a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!
Adorine women live through this week by the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the men Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get up before day to look across again longing, longing all the time. Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or experience.
Adorine!" the beautiful angel voices called to her; "Zepherin! Zepherin!" she answered, as if she, too, were an angel, signaling another angel in heaven. It was too much. She wept, and that broke the charm. She could hear nothing more after that. All that day was despondency, dejection, tear-bedewed eyes, and tremulous lips, the commonplace reaction, as all know, of love exaltation.
What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or resignation, at least when one is a man of eighteen, the last interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight, the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.
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