Marguerite looked at her mother and said, “Have you nothing else to say to me about my marriage?”

“Can you hesitate, my child?” cried the dying woman in alarm.

“No,” the daughter answered; “I promise to obey you.”

“Poor girl!  I did not sacrifice myself for you,” said the mother, shedding hot tears.  “Yet I ask you to sacrifice yourself for all.  Happiness makes us selfish.  Be strong; preserve your own good sense to guard others who as yet have none.  Act so that your brothers and your sister may not reproach my memory.  Love your father, and do not oppose him—­too much.”

She laid her head on her pillow and said no more; her strength was gone; the inward struggle between the Wife and the Mother had been too violent.

A few moments later the clergy came, preceded by the Abbe de Solis, and the parlor was filled by the children and the household.  When the ceremony was about to begin, Madame Claes, awakened by her confessor, looked about her and not seeing Balthazar said quickly,—­

“Where is my husband?”

Those words—­summing up, as it were, her life and her death—­were uttered in such lamentable tones that all present shuddered.  Martha, in spite of her great age, darted out of the room, ran up the staircase and through the gallery, and knocked loudly on the door of the laboratory.

“Monsieur, madame is dying; they are waiting for you, to administer the last sacraments,” she cried with the violence of indignation.

“I am coming,” answered Balthazar.

Lemulquinier came down a moment later, and said his master was following him.  Madame Claes’s eyes never left the parlor door, but her husband did not appear until the ceremony was over.  When at last he entered, Josephine colored and a few tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Were you trying to decompose nitrogen?” she said to him with an angelic tenderness which made the spectators quiver.

“I have done it!” he cried joyfully; “Nitrogen contains oxygen and a substance of the nature of imponderable matter, which is apparently the principle of—­”

A murmur of horror interrupted his words and brought him to his senses.

“What did they tell me?” he demanded.  “Are you worse?  What is the matter?”

“This is the matter, monsieur,” whispered the Abbe de Solis, indignant at his conduct; “your wife is dying, and you have killed her.”

Without waiting for an answer the abbe took the arm of his nephew and went out followed by the family, who accompanied him to the court-yard.  Balthazar stood as if thunderstruck; he looked at his wife, and a few tears dropped from his eyes.

“You are dying, and I have killed you!” he said.  “What does he mean?”

“My husband,” she answered, “I only lived in your love, and you have taken my life away from me; but you knew not what you did.”

“Leave us,” said Claes to his children, who now re-entered the room.  “Have I for one moment ceased to love you?” he went on, sitting down beside his wife, and taking her hands and kissing them.