I listened to the count in terror.  On meeting the countess I had been struck with her yellow skin and the feverish brilliancy of her eyes.  I led the count towards the house while seeming to listen to his complaints and his medical dissertations; but my thoughts were all with Henriette, and I wanted to observe her.  We found her in the salon, where she was listening to a lesson in mathematics which the Abbe Dominis was giving Jacques, and at the same time showing Madeleine a stitch of embroidery.  Formerly she would have laid aside every occupation the day of my arrival to be with me.  But my love was so deeply real that I drove back into my heart the grief I felt at this contrast between the past and the present, and thought only of the fatal yellow tint on that celestial face, which resembled the halo of divine light Italian painters put around the faces of their saints.  I felt the icy wind of death pass over me.  Then when the fire of her eyes, no longer softened by the liquid light in which in former times they moved, fell upon me, I shuddered; I noticed several changes, caused by grief, which I had not seen in the open air.  The slender lines which, at my last visit, were so lightly marked upon her forehead had deepened; her temples with their violet veins seemed burning and concave; her eyes were sunk beneath the brows, their circles browned;—­alas! she was discolored like a fruit when decay is beginning to show upon the surface, or a worm is at the core.  I, whose whole ambition had been to pour happiness into her soul, I it was who embittered the spring from which she had hoped to refresh her life and renew her courage.  I took a seat beside her and said in a voice filled with tears of repentance, “Are you satisfied with your own health?”

“Yes,” she answered, plunging her eyes into mine.  “My health is there,” she added, motioning to Jacques and Madeleine.

The latter, just fifteen, had come victoriously out of her struggle with anaemia, and was now a woman.  She had grown tall; the Bengal roses were blooming in her once sallow cheeks.  She had lost the unconcern of a child who looks every one in the face, and now dropped her eyes; her movements were slow and infrequent, like those of her mother; her figure was slim, but the gracefulness of the bust was already developing; already an instinct of coquetry had smoothed the magnificent black hair which lay in bands upon her Spanish brow.  She was like those pretty statuettes of the Middle Ages, so delicate in outline, so slender in form that the eye as it seizes their charm fears to break them.  Health, the fruit of untold efforts, had made her cheeks as velvety as a peach and given to her throat the silken down which, like her mother’s, caught the light.  She was to live!  God had written it, dear bud of the loveliest of human flowers, on the long lashes of her eyelids, on the curve of those shoulders which gave promise of a development as superb as her mother’s!  This brown young girl,