There it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that
anything had changed in the lives of those who made the place other than
a dead or deserted world. When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his
cousin Auguste Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed him,
the house and mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and well-
kept yards and barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same. Thus it was
that he had been fortified. In one sense his miseries had seemed unreal,
because all was the same in the outward scene. It was as though it all
said to him: "It is a dream that those you love have vanished, that ill-
fortune sits by your fireside. One night you will go to bed thinking
that wife and child have gone, that your treasury is nearly empty; and in
the morning you will wake up and find your loved ones sitting in their
accustomed places, and your treasury will be full to overflowing as of
old."
So it was while the picture of his home scene remained unbroken and
serene; but the hideous mass of last night's holocaust was now before his
eyes, with little streams of smoke rising from the cindered pile, and
a hundred things with which his eyes had been familiar lay distorted,
excoriated and useless.
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