She stopped.  During this moment when her thoughts were misty and her soul floated in a region of fantasy her naivete made her attribute to that last look with which her lover transfixed her the occult power of the visitation of the angel to the Mother of her Lord.  This supposition, worthy of the days of innocence to which her reverie had carried her back, vanished before the memory of a conjugal scene more odious than death.  The poor countess could have no real doubt as to the legitimacy of the child that stirred in her womb.  The night of her marriage reappeared to her in all the horror if its agony, bringing in its train other such nights and sadder days.

“Ah! my poor Chaverny!” she cried, weeping, “you so respectful, so gracious, you were always kind to me.”

She turned her eyes to her husband as if to persuade herself that that harsh face contained a promise of mercy, dearly brought.  The count was awake.  His yellow eyes, clear as those of a tiger, glittered beneath their tufted eyebrows and never had his glance been so incisive.  The countess, terrified at having encountered it, slid back under the great counterpane and was motionless.

“Why are you weeping?” said the count, pulling away the covering which hid his wife.

That voice, always a terror to her, had a specious softness at this moment which seemed to her of good augury.

“I suffer much,” she answered.

“Well, my pretty one, it is no crime to suffer; why did you tremble when I looked at you?  Alas! what must I do to be loved?” The wrinkles of his forehead between the eyebrows deepened.  “I see plainly you are afraid of me,” he added, sighing.

Prompted by the instinct of feeble natures the countess interrupted the count by moans, exclaiming:—­

“I fear a miscarriage!  I clambered over the rocks last evening and tired myself.”

Hearing those words, the count cast so horribly suspicious a look upon his wife, that she reddened and shuddered.  He mistook the fear of the innocent creature for remorse.

“Perhaps it is the beginning of a regular childbirth,” he said.

“What then?” she said.

“In any case, I must have a proper man here,” he said.  “I will fetch one.”

The gloomy look which accompanied these words overcame the countess, who fell back in the bed with a moan, caused more by a sense of her fate than by the agony of the coming crisis; that moan convinced the count of the justice of the suspicions that were rising in his mind.  Affecting a calmness which the tones of his voice, his gestures, and looks contradicted, he rose hastily, wrapped himself in a dressing-gown which lay on a chair, and began by locking a door near the chimney through which the state bedroom was entered from the reception rooms which communicated with the great staircase.