Josephine did not immediately reply:  her thoughts turned inwards.  The good doctor was proceeding to congratulate her on being cured of a fatal passion, when she stopped him with wonder in her face.  “Not love him!  How can I help loving him?  I was his betrothed.  I wronged him in my thoughts.  War, prison, anguish, could not kill him; he loved me so.  He struggled bleeding to my feet; and could I let him die, after all?  Could I be crueller than prison, and torture, and despair?”

The doctor sighed deeply; but, arming himself with the necessary resolution, he sternly replied, “A woman of your name cannot vacillate between love and honor; such vacillations have but one end.  I will not let you drift a moral wreck between passion and virtue; and that is what it will come to if you hesitate now.”

“Hesitate!  Who can say I have hesitated where my honor was concerned?  You can read our bodies then, but not our hearts.  What! you see me so pale, forlorn, and dead, and that does not tell you I have bid Camille farewell forever?  That we might be safer still I have not even told him he is a father:  was ever woman so cruel as I am?  I have written him but one letter, and in that I must deceive him.  I told him I thought I might one day be happy, if I could hear that he did not give way to despair.  I told him we must never meet again in this world.  So now come what will:  show me my duty and I will do it.  This endless deceit burns my heart.  Shall I tell my husband?  It will be but one pang more, one blush more for me.  But my mother!” and, thus appealed to, Dr. Aubertin felt, for the first time, all the difficulty of the situation he had undertaken to cure.  He hesitated, he was embarrassed.

“Ah,” said Josephine, “you see.”  Then, after a short silence, she said despairingly, “This is my only hope:  that poor Raynal will be long absent, and that ere he returns mamma will lie safe from sorrow and shame in the little chapel.  Doctor, when a woman of my age forms such wishes as these, I think you might pity her, and forgive her ill-treatment of you, for she cannot be very happy.  Ah me! ah me! ah me!”

“Courage, poor soul!  All is now in my hands, and I will save you,” said the doctor, his voice trembling in spite of him.  “Guilt lies in the intention.  A more innocent woman than you does not breathe.  Two courses lay open to you:  to leave this house with Camille Dujardin, or to dismiss him, and live for your hard duty till it shall please Heaven to make that duty easy (no middle course was tenable for a day); of these two paths you chose the right one, and, having chosen, I really think you are not called on to reveal your misfortune, and make those unhappy to whose happiness you have sacrificed your own for years to come.”

“Forever,” said Josephine quietly.

“The young use that word lightly.  The old have almost ceased to use it.  They have seen how few earthly things can conquer time.”