“What does that mean?” answered Balthazar, turning quickly, and casting a look of reviving intelligence upon his wife, which fell upon her like a thunderbolt.

“Forgive me, my friend,” she said, turning pale.  She tried to rise and put out her hand to him, but her strength gave way and she fell back.  “I am dying!” she cried in a voice choked by sobs.

At the sight Balthazar had, like all abstracted persons, a vivid reaction of mind; and he divined, so to speak, the secret cause of this attack.  Taking Madame Claes at once in his arms, he opened the door upon the little antechamber, and ran so rapidly up the ancient wooden staircase that his wife’s dress having caught on the jaws of one of the griffins that supported the balustrade, a whole breadth was torn off with a loud noise.  He kicked in the door of the vestibule between their chambers, but the door of Josephine’s bedroom was locked.

He gently placed her on a chair, saying to himself, “My God! the key, where is the key?”

“Thank you, dear friend,” said Madame Claes, opening her eyes.  “This is the first time for a long, long while that I have been so near your heart.”

“Good God!” cried Claes, “the key!—­here come the servants.”

Josephine signed to him to take a key that hung from a ribbon at her waist.  After opening the door, Balthazar laid his wife on a sofa, and left the room to stop the frightened servants from coming up by giving them orders to serve the dinner; then he went back to Madame Claes.

“What is it, my dear life?” he said, sitting down beside her, and taking her hand and kissing it.

“Nothing—­now,” she answered.  “I suffer no longer.  Only, I would I had the power of God to pour all the gold of the world at thy feet.”

“Why gold?” he asked.  He took her in his arms, pressed her to him and kissed her once more upon the forehead.  “Do you not give me the greatest of all riches in loving me as you do love me, my dear and precious wife?”

“Oh! my Balthazar, will you not drive away the anguish of our lives as your voice now drives out the misery of my heart?  At last, at last, I see that you are still the same.”

“What anguish do you speak of, dear?”

“My friend, we are ruined.”

“Ruined!” he repeated.  Then, with a smile, he stroked her hand, holding it within his own, and said in his tender voice, so long unheard:  “To-morrow, dear love, our wealth may perhaps be limitless.  Yesterday, in searching for a far more important secret, I think I found the means of crystallizing carbon, the substance of the diamond.  Oh, my dear wife! in a few days’ time you will forgive me all my forgetfulness—­I am forgetful sometimes, am I not?  Was I not harsh to you just now?  Be indulgent for a man who never ceases to think of you, whose toils are full of you—­of us.”

“Enough, enough!” she said, “let us talk of it all to-night, dear friend.  I suffered from too much grief, and now I suffer from too much joy.”