“Oh God! leave me this angel still a little while that I may blot out my wrong by love and adoration.  As a daughter, she is sublime; as a wife, what word can express her?”

Clemence raised her eyes; they were full of tears.

“You pain me,” she said, in a feeble voice.

It was getting late; Doctor Haudry came, and requested the husband to withdraw during his visit.  When the doctor left the sick-room Jules asked him no question; one gesture was enough.

“Call in consultation any physician in whom you place confidence; I may be wrong.”

“Doctor, tell me the truth.  I am a man, and I can bear it.  Besides, I have the deepest interest in knowing it; I have certain affairs to settle.”

“Madame Jules is dying,” said the physician.  “There is some moral malady which has made great progress, and it has complicated her physical condition, which was already dangerous, and made still more so by her great imprudence.  To walk about barefooted at night! to go out when I forbade it! on foot yesterday in the rain, to-day in a carriage!  She must have meant to kill herself.  But still, my judgment is not final; she has youth, and a most amazing nervous strength.  It may be best to risk all to win all by employing some violent reagent.  But I will not take upon myself to order it; nor will I advise it; in consultation I shall oppose it.”

Jules returned to his wife.  For eleven days and eleven nights he remained beside her bed, taking no sleep during the day when he laid his head upon the foot of the bed.  No man ever pushed the jealousy of care and the craving for devotion to such an extreme as he.  He could not endure that the slightest service should be done by others for his wife.  There were days of uncertainty, false hopes, now a little better, then a crisis,—­in short, all the horrible mutations of death as it wavers, hesitates, and finally strikes.  Madame Jules always found strength to smile at her husband.  She pitied him, knowing that soon he would be alone.  It was a double death,—­that of life, that of love; but life grew feebler, and love grew mightier.  One frightful night there was, when Clemence passed through that delirium which precedes the death of youth.  She talked of her happy love, she talked of her father; she related her mother’s revelations on her death-bed, and the obligations that mother had laid upon her.  She struggled, not for life, but for her love which she could not leave.

“Grant, O God!” she said, “that he may not know I want him to die with me.”

Jules, unable to bear the scene, was at that moment in the adjoining room, and did not hear the prayer, which he would doubtless have fulfilled.

When this crisis was over, Madame Jules recovered some strength.  The next day she was beautiful and tranquil; hope seemed to come to her; she adorned herself, as the dying often do.  Then she asked to be alone all day, and sent away her husband with one of those entreaties made so earnestly that they are granted as we grant the prayer of a little child.