“I like you better in black,” she said.

It was a falsehood, but by that falsehood she comforted her lover for having thrown his dagger to the winds.  The memory of the little schemes employed to deceive her mother, whose severity seemed great, brought back to her the soulful joys of that innocent and mutual and sanctioned love; sometimes a rendezvous beneath the linden, where speech could be freer than before witnesses; sometimes a furtive clasp, or a stolen kiss,—­in short, all the naive instalments of a passion that did not pass the bounds of modesty.  Reliving in her vision those delightful days when she seemed to have too much happiness, she fancied that she kissed, in the void, that fine young face with the glowing eyes, that rosy mouth that spoke so well of love.  Yes, she had loved Chaverny, poor apparently; but what treasures had she not discovered in that soul as tender as it was strong!

Suddenly her father died.  Chaverny did not succeed him.  The flames of civil war burst forth.  By Chaverny’s care she and her mother found refuge in a little town of Lower Normandy.  Soon the deaths of other relatives made her one of the richest heiresses in France.  Happiness disappeared as wealth came to her.  The savage and terrible face of Comte d’Herouville, who asked her hand, rose before her like a thunder-cloud, spreading its gloom over the smiling meadows so lately gilded by the sun.  The poor countess strove to cast from her memory the scenes of weeping and despair brought about by her long resistance.

At last came an awful night when her mother, pale and dying, threw herself at her daughter’s feet.  Jeanne could save Chaverny’s life by yielding; she yielded.  It was night.  The count, arriving bloody from the battlefield was there; all was ready, the priest, the altar, the torches!  Jeanne belonged henceforth to misery.  Scarcely had she time to say to her young cousin who was set at liberty:—­

“Georges, if you love me, never see me again!”

She heard the departing steps of her lover, whom, in truth, she never saw again; but in the depths of her heart she still kept sacred his last look which returned perpetually in her dreams and illumined them.  Living like a cat shut into a lion’s cage, the young wife dreaded at all hours the claws of the master which ever threatened her.  She knew that in order to be happy she must forget the past and think only of the future; but there were days, consecrated to the memory of some vanished joy, when she deliberately made it a crime to put on the gown she had worn on the day she had seen her lover for the first time.

“I am not guilty,” she said, “but if I seem guilty to the count it is as if I were so.  Perhaps I am!  The Holy Virgin conceived without—­”