When I saw the linen which she had concealed under her clothes to bring it out, I could not disguise my horror, and I thought the sight would kill me.  I fancied myself in a slaughter-house!  Laura, thinking of consoling me, told me that I could rely upon the secret being well kept.

“Ah! what do I care!” I exclaimed.  “Provided she lives, let the whole world know that she is my wife!”

At any other time, the foolishness of poor Laura would have made me laugh; but in such a sad moment I had neither the inclination nor the courage to be merry.

“Our dear patient,” added Laura, “smiled as she was reading your letter, and she said that, with you so near her, she was certain not to die.”

Those words did me good, but a man needs so little to console him or to soothe his grief.

“When the nuns are at their dinner,” said Laura, “I will go back to the convent with as much linen as I can conceal about me, and in the mean time I am going to wash all this.”

“Has she had any visitors?”

“Oh, yes! all the convent; but no one has any suspicion of the truth.”

“But in such hot weather as this she can have only a very light blanket over her, and her visitors must remark the great bulk of the napkins.”

“There is no fear of that, because she is sitting up in her bed.”

“What does she eat?”

“Nothing, for she must not eat.”

Soon afterwards Laura went out, and I followed her.  I called upon a physician, where I wasted my time and my money, in order to get from him a long prescription which was useless, for it would have put all the convent in possession of the secret, or, to speak more truly, her secret would have been known to the whole world, for a secret known to a nun soon escapes out of the convent’s walls.  Besides, the physician of the convent himself would most likely have betrayed it through a spirit of revenge.

I returned sadly to my miserable hole in Laura’s house.  Half an hour afterwards she came to me, crying bitterly, and she placed in my hands this letter, which was scarcely legible: 

“I have not strength enough to write to you, my darling; I am getting weaker and weaker; I am losing all my blood, and I am afraid there is no remedy.  I abandon myself to the will of God, and I thank Him for having saved me from dishonour.  Do not make yourself unhappy.  My only consolation is to know that you are near me.  Alas! if I could see you but for one moment I would die happy.”

The sight of a dozen napkins brought by Laura made me shudder, and the good woman imagined that she afforded me some consolation by telling me that as much linen could be soaked with a bottle of blood.  My mind was not disposed to taste such consolation; I was in despair, and I addressed to myself the fiercest reproaches, upbraiding myself as the cause of the death of that adorable creature.  I threw myself on the bed, and remained there, almost stunned, for more than six hours, until Laura’s return from the convent with twenty napkins entirely soaked.  Night had come on, and she could not go back to her patient until morning.  I passed a fearful night without food, without sleep, looking upon myself with horror, and refusing all the kind attentions that Laura’s daughters tried to shew me.