courage induced them to venture a little farther who received condemnation.  In some way or other, every soul is wearing out and overtasking somebody else’s soul, and shortening somebody’s days.  A man who should throw his child into the water, in order to save him from being burned to death, would not be arraigned for the fierce choice.  Little Jacques, if he had lived, would have lingered in misery and imbecility.  Was a lingering death of torture to be preferred by a tenderhearted woman to one more rapid and less painful, where the certainty of death left only such preference?  Ah, well! it was consolation that his little son was safe from all vicissitude, whatever might befall his devoted father!” and Monsieur wiped his eyes, and drew out a little miniature he always carried in his bosom.  It was the portrait of little Jacques.

Well, as I have said, Monsieur was a philosopher, and I was a philosopher; and yet I must have been a woman incapable of reason, incapable of comprehending an argument; for the thought of this thing, and of being in the presence of a man capable of such a deed, made me uneasy, restless, unhappy, as though I were in some sort a partaker of the crime.  I could not sleep; I was haunted with horrific dreams; and when, in few days, among the “accidents” the death of an unknown woman was recorded, whose body had drifted ashore at night, and I recognized by the description poor, unknown, uncared-for Madame C——­, a wild fever burned in my veins, a frenzy of anguish akin to remorse, as if I had wronged the dead, and sent her drifting, helpless, out to the unknown world.  A pitiable soul, who preferred misery for her portion, rather than betray the man she loved, or become partaker of his crime, had crept back, after years of self-imposed absence, with death in her heart, to see the old place and the new wife,—­and how had I received her?  With horror and shuddering, as though she were some guilty thing, to be held at arm’s-length.  Not as one woman, generous, forgiving, hoping for mercy hereafter, should receive another, however erring.  It was a sad boon, perhaps, she had endowed me with; yet it was all she prized and cherished.

With a nobleness of magnanimity, a passionate self-sacrifice, which none but a woman could be capable of, Madame C——­ had divested herself of all peculiarities of clothing by which she could be identified.  It was only by recognizing the features, and a singular scar upon the forehead, that I knew it was herself.  She was buried by stranger hands, however; we dared not come forward to claim her.

The excitement attendant on this miserable death, and the circumstances which preceded it, laid me, for the first time in my life, upon a sick-bed.  I was unconscious for many weeks of anything save intolerable pain and intolerable heat.  A fiery agony of fever leaped in my veins, and scorched up my life-blood.  I believe Monsieur cared for me, and nursed me attentively during this illness.