voices that we might not wake the count.  Suddenly, I heard the guttural sound of a sob violently suppressed; I rushed into the salon and found the countess sitting by the window with her handkerchief to her face.  She heard my step and made me an imperious gesture, commanding me to leave her.  I went up to her, my heart stabbed with fear, and tried to take her handkerchief away by force.  Her face was bathed in tears and she fled into her room, which she did not leave again until the hour for evening prayer.  When that was over, I led her to the terrace and asked the cause of her emotion; she affected a wild gaiety and explained it by the news Monsieur Origet had given her.

“Henriette, Henriette, you knew that news when I saw you weeping.  Between you and me a lie is monstrous.  Why did you forbid me to dry your tears? were they mine?”

“I was thinking,” she said, “that for me this illness has been a halt in pain.  Now that I no longer fear for Monsieur de Mortsauf I fear for myself.”

She was right.  The count’s recovery was soon attested by the return of his fantastic humor.  He began by saying that neither the countess, nor I, nor the doctor had known how to take care of him; we were ignorant of his constitution and also of his disease; we misunderstood his sufferings and the necessary remedies.  Origet, infatuated with his own doctrines, had mistaken the case, he ought to have attended only to the pylorus.  One day he looked at us maliciously, with an air of having guessed our thoughts, and said to his wife with a smile, “Now, my dear, if I had died you would have regretted me, no doubt, but pray admit you would have been quite resigned.”

“Yes, I should have mourned you in pink and black, court mourning,” she answered laughing, to change the tone of his remarks.

But it was chiefly about his food, which the doctor insisted on regulating, that scenes of violence and wrangling now took place, unlike any that had hitherto occurred; for the character of the count was all the more violent for having slumbered.  The countess, fortified by the doctor’s orders and the obedience of her servants, stimulated too by me, who thought this struggle a good means to teach her to exercise authority over the count, held out against his violence.  She showed a calm front to his demented cries, and even grew accustomed to his insulting epithets, taking him for what he was, a child.  I had the happiness of at last seeing her take the reins in hand and govern that unsound mind.  The count cried out, but he obeyed; and he obeyed all the better when he had made an outcry.  But in spite of the evidence of good results, Henriette often wept at the spectacle of this emaciated, feeble old man, with a forehead yellower than the falling leaves, his eyes wan, his hands trembling.  She blamed herself for too much severity, and could not resist the joy she saw in his eyes when, in measuring out his food, she gave him more than the doctor allowed.  She was even more gentle and gracious to him than she had been to me; but there were differences here which filled my heart with joy.  She was not unwearying, and she sometimes called her servants to wait upon the count when his caprices changed too rapidly, and he complained of not being understood.