Just as she was going out of the room I broke down altogether, and burst into tears, as on the previous night at the chapel window.  Edmee stopped on the threshold and hesitated a moment.  Then, yielding to the kindly impulses of her heart, she overcame her fears and returned towards me.  Pausing a few yards from my chair, she said: 

“Bernard, you are unhappy.  Tell me; is it my fault?”

I was unable to reply; I was ashamed of my tears, but the more I tried to restrain them the more my breast heaved with sobs.  With men as physically strong as I was, tears are generally convulsions; mine were like the pangs of death.

“Come now!  Just tell me what is wrong,” cried Edmee, with some of the bluntness of sisterly affection.

And she ventured to put her hand on my shoulder.  She was looking at me with an expression of wistfulness, and a big tear was trickling down her cheek.  I threw myself on my knees and tried to speak, but that was still impossible.  I could do no more than mutter the word to-morrow several times.

“‘To-morrow?’ What of tomorrow?” said Edmee.  “Do you not like being here?  Do you want to go away?”

“I will go, if it will please you,” I replied.  “Tell me; do you wish never to see me again?”

“I do not wish that at all,” she rejoined.  “You will stop here, won’t you.”

“It is for you to decide,” I answered.

She looked at me in astonishment.  I was still on my knees.  She leant over the back of my chair.

“Yes; I am quite sure that you are good at heart,” she said, as if she were answering some inner objection.  “A Mauprat can be nothing by halves; and as soon as you have once known a good quarter of an hour, it is certain you ought to have a noble life before you.”

“I will make it so,” I answered.

“You mean it?” she said with unaffected joy.

“On my honour, Edmee, and on yours.  Dare you give me your hand?”

“Certainly,” she said.

She held out her hand to me; but she was still trembling.

“You have been forming good resolutions, then?” she said.

“I have been forming such resolutions,” I replied, “that you will never have to reproach me again.  And now, Edmee, when you return to your room, please do not bolt your door any more.  You need no longer be afraid of me.  Henceforth I shall only wish what you wish.”

She again fixed on me a look of amazement.  Then, after pressing my hand, she moved away, but turned round several times to look at me again, as if unable to believe in such a sudden conversion.  At last, stopping in the doorway, she said to me in an affectionate tone: 

“You, too, must go and get some rest.  You look tired; and for the last two days you have seemed sad and very much altered.  If you do not wish to make me anxious, you will take care of yourself, Bernard.”

She gave me a sweet little nod.  In her big eyes, already hollowed by suffering, there was an indefinable expression, in which distrust and hope, affection and wonder, were depicted alternately or at times all together.