“God bless you, sir!” she exclaimed.  “I should have died with the very thought that a breath of suspicion was harboured against him.”

“Ah! madam, who could possibly attach any reality to the action of a somnambulist?”

“That is quite true, sir; I had had that thought myself, but appearances—­pardon me—­yet I feared—­still I knew Doctor Fritz was a man of honour.”

“Pray, madam, be calm.”

“No,” she cried, “let me weep on.  It is such a relief; for ten years I have suffered in secret.  Oh, how I suffered!  That secret, so long shut up in my breast, was killing me.  I should soon have died, like my dear mother.  God has had pity upon me, and has sent you, and made you share it with me.  Let me tell you all, sir, do let me!”

She could speak no more.  Sobs and tears broke her voice.  So it always is with proud and lofty natures.  After having conquered grief, and imprisoned it, buried, and, as it were, crushed down in the secret depths of the mind, they seem happy, or, at any rate, indifferent to the eyes of the uninformed around, and the eye of the most watchful observer might be mistaken; but let a sudden shock break the seal, an unexpected rending of a portion of the veil, then, as with the crash of a thunderstorm, the tower in which the sufferer hid his sorrow falls in ruins to the ground.  The conquered foe rises more fierce than before his defeat and captivity; he shakes with fury the prison doors, the frame trembles with long shudderings, sobs and sighs heave the breast, the tears, too long contained within bounds, overflow their swollen banks, bounding and rushing as if after the heavy rain of a thunderstorm.

Such was Odile.

At length she lifted her beautiful head; she wiped her tear-stained cheeks, and with her arm on the elbow of her chair, her cheek resting on her hand, and her eyes tenderly fixed on a picture on the wall, she resumed in slow and melancholy tones:—­

“When I go back into the past, sir, when I return to my first impressions, my mother’s is the picture before me.  She was a tall, pale, and silent woman.  She was still young at the period to which I am referring.  She was scarcely thirty, and yet you would have thought her fifty.  Her brow was silvered round with hair white as snow; her thin, hollow cheeks, her sharp, clear profile—­her lips ever closed together with an expression of pain—­gave to her features a strange character in which pride and pain seemed to contend for the mastery.  There was nothing left of the elasticity of youth in that aged woman of thirty—­nothing but her tall, upright figure, her brilliant eyes, and her voice, which was always as gentle and as sweet as a dream of childhood.  She often walked up and down for hours in this very room, with her head hanging down, and I, an unthinking child, ran happily along by her side, never aware that my mother was sad, never understanding the meaning of the deep melancholy revealed by those furrows that traversed her fair brow.  I knew nothing of the past, to me the present was joy and happiness, and oh! the future!—­the dark, miserable future!—­there was none!  My only future was to-morrow’s play!”