“Why your brother?” asked Clemence.

But Jules had already left the room.

CHAPTER IV

WHERE GO TO DIE?

For the first time in five years Madame Jules slept alone in her bed, and was compelled to admit a physician into that sacred chamber.  These in themselves were two keen pangs.  Desplein found Madame Jules very ill.  Never was a violent emotion more untimely.  He would say nothing definite, and postponed till the morrow giving any opinion, after leaving a few directions, which were not executed, the emotions of the heart causing all bodily cares to be forgotten.

When morning dawned, Clemence had not yet slept.  Her mind was absorbed in the low murmur of a conversation which lasted several hours between the brothers; but the thickness of the walls allowed no word which could betray the object of this long conference to reach her ears.  Monsieur Desmarets, the notary, went away at last.  The stillness of the night, and the singular activity of the senses given by powerful emotion, enabled Clemence to distinguish the scratching of a pen and the involuntary movements of a person engaged in writing.  Those who are habitually up at night, and who observe the different acoustic effects produced in absolute silence, know that a slight echo can be readily perceived in the very places where louder but more equable and continued murmurs are not distinct.  At four o’clock the sound ceased.  Clemence rose, anxious and trembling.  Then, with bare feet and without a wrapper, forgetting her illness and her moist condition, the poor woman opened the door softly without noise and looked into the next room.  She saw her husband sitting, with a pen in his hand, asleep in his arm-chair.  The candles had burned to the sockets.  She slowly advanced and read on an envelope, already sealed, the words, “This is my will.”

She knelt down as if before an open grave and kissed her husband’s hand.  He woke instantly.

“Jules, my friend, they grant some days to criminals condemned to death,” she said, looking at him with eyes that blazed with fever and with love.  “Your innocent wife asks only two.  Leave me free for two days, and—­wait!  After that, I shall die happy—­at least, you will regret me.”

“Clemence, I grant them.”

Then, as she kissed her husband’s hands in the tender transport of her heart, Jules, under the spell of that cry of innocence, took her in his arms and kissed her forehead, though ashamed to feel himself still under subjection to the power of that noble beauty.

On the morrow, after taking a few hours’ rest, Jules entered his wife’s room, obeying mechanically his invariable custom of not leaving the house without a word to her.  Clemence was sleeping.  A ray of light passing through a chink in the upper blind of a window fell across the face of the dejected woman.  Already suffering had impaired her forehead and the freshness of her lips.  A lover’s eye could not fail to notice the appearance of dark blotches, and a sickly pallor in place of the uniform tone of the cheeks and the pure ivory whiteness of the skin,—­two points at which the sentiments of her noble soul were artlessly wont to show themselves.