“What! do you value my life, then?” she said.

“Most undoubtedly.”

“That’s magnanimous!”

She walked a few steps in silence, resting lightly upon the arm of her companion, and rocking, in her peculiar way, her graceful figure.

“Your good cure must take me for a species of demon,” she added.

“He is not the only one,” said Lucan, with ironical coldness.

She laughed a short and constrained laugh; then, after another pause, and while continuing to walk with downcast eyes: 

“You must certainly hate me a little less now; say, don’t you?”

“A little less.”

“Be serious, will you?  I know that I have made you suffer a great deal.  Are you beginning to forgive me now?”

Her voice had assumed an accent of tenderness quite unusual to it, and which touched Monsieur de Lucan.

“I forgive you with all my heart, my child,” he replied.

She stopped, and grasping his two hands: 

“True?  We will not hate each other any more?” she said, in a low and apparently timid tone.  “You love me a little?”

“Thank you,” said Lucan, with grave emotion; “thank you; I love you very much.”

As she was drawing him gently toward her he clasped her in a frank and affectionate embrace, and pressed his lips upon the forehead she was holding up to him; but at the same instant he felt her supple figure stiffen; her head rolled back; then she sank bodily, and slipped in his arms like a flower whose stem has suddenly been mowed down.

There was a bench within two steps; he carried her there, but after laying her upon it, instead of affording her the required assistance, he remained in an attitude of strange immobility before that lovely and helpless form.  A long silence followed, broken only by the gentle and monotonous ripple of the brook.  Shaking off his stupor at last, Monsieur de Lucan called out several times in a loud and almost harsh voice: 

“Julia!  Julia!”

As she remained motionless still, he ran down into the ravine, took some water in the hollow of his hand, and bathed her temples with it.  In the course of a minute or two, he saw her eyes opening in the darkness, and he helped her raise her head.

“What is it?” she said, looking at him with a wild expression; “what has happened, sir?”

“Why, you fainted,” said Lucan, laughing.

“Fainted?” repeated Julia.

“Of course; that’s just what I feared; you must have been benumbed by the cold.  Can you walk?  Come, try.”

“Perfectly well,” she said, rising and taking his arm.

Like all those who experience sudden prostration, Julia remembered, but in a very indistinct manner, the circumstance that had brought about her fainting.

In the meantime they had resumed their walk slowly in the direction of the chateau.

“Fainted!” she repeated, gayly; “mon Dieu! how perfectly ridiculous!”