The fever left me; exhausted, spent, my life shrunken up within me, my energy burned out, a puny, spiritless remnant of the strong woman who lay down upon that couch, I lay despondent, vacant of all interest in the world hitherto so exciting to me.  I had not seen Monsieur since this apparent commencement of recovery.  A great, good-natured nurse kept watch over me, and fed me with spiritless dainties, tasteless, unsatisfying.

One day, when my senses began to settle a little, and things began to take shape again, I asked for Monsieur.  He came and stood at my bedside.

“Christine,” said he, “you have no faith in my power of making angels.  I have not made one of you.  Being divided in our theories, we will divide our earthly goods.  We will part.  Should you as a woman deem it your duty to inform against me, I shall not think it wrong.  I shall bear it as a philosopher.  You have no proof, you can substantiate nothing; but it may be a satisfaction.  I do not understand women; therefore I cannot tell.”

“Monsieur,” I answered, “leave it to God to fill His heaven as He thinks best.  He has not invited your assistance; neither has He invited me to avenge Him.  Since He does not punish, dare I invade His prerogative?”

And we did not part.

We will live together in peace, we said, and the past shall be utterly forgotten; shall not a whole lifetime of unwavering rectitude atone for this one crime?

I accepted my fate,—­weakly, in the dread of poverty, in the horror of disgrace, shrinking within myself with the secret thrust upon me.  I said we are all the makers of our own destiny, and there is nothing supernatural in life.  If this course is best and wisest in my judgment, nothing evil will come of it.  I said this, ignorant of the mystery of existence, and inexperienced in that subtile power which penetrates all the windings and turnings of humanity, searching out hidden things,—­the Purifier, and the Avenger, allotting to each one his portion of bitterness, his inexorable punishment.  “We will live together in peace”:  it was the thought of a sudden moment of fervor, which overleaped the dreary length of life, and assumed to compass the repentance of a whole existence in a single day.

But destiny holds always in store its retribution.  God suffers no dropped stitches in the web of His universe, and the smallest truth evaded, the least wretch neglected, will surely be picked up again in the unending circle that is winding its certain thread around all beings, connecting by invisible links the most insignificant chances with the most significant events.

When I said we will be one, we will endure together, I thought that so, in my enduring strength, I could bear up whatever burden came.  I know not how, by what invisible process, the load which I had lifted to my shoulders grew into leaden heaviness,—­heavy, heavy, like the weight of some dead soul resting its lifeless shape upon my living spirit, till I staggered under the unbearable presence.  I had doomed myself to stand side by side, to work hand in hand with guilt, to feel hourly the dread lest in some moment of frenzy engendered by the dumb anguish within me I might betray the secret whose rust was eating into my soul, and shriek out my misery in the ears of all men.