ast.

Moina came into the room with Pauline, her maid, and the landlady and
the doctor. The Marquise was holding her daughter's ice-cold hand in
both of hers, and gazing at her in despair; but the widowed woman, who
had escaped shipwreck with but one of all her fair band of children,
spoke in a voice that was dreadful to hear. "All this is your work," she
said. "If you had but been for me all that--"

"Moina, go! Go out of the room, all of you!" cried Mme. d'Aiglemont, her
shrill tones drowning Helene's voice.--"For pity's sake," she continued,
"let us not begin these miserable quarrels again now----"

"I will be silent," Helene answered with a preternatural effort. "I am a
mother; I know that Moina ought not... Where is my child?"

Moina came back, impelled by curiosity.

"Sister," said the spoiled child, "the doctor--"

"It is all of no use," said Helene. "Oh! why did I not die as a girl of
sixteen when I meant to take my own life? There is no happiness outside
the laws. Moina... you..."

Her head sank till her face lay against the face of the little one; in
her agony she strained her babe to her breast, and died.

"Your sister, Moina," said Mme. d'Aiglemont, bursting into tears when
she reached her room, "your sister meant no doubt to tell you that a
girl will never find happiness in a romantic life, in living as nobody
else does, and, above all things, far away from her mother."

VI. THE OLD AGE OF A GUILTY MOTHER

It was one of the earliest June days of the year 1844. A lady of fifty
or thereabouts, for she looked older than her actual age, was pacing up
and down one of the sunny paths in the garden of a great mansion in
the Rue Plument in Paris. It was noon. The lady took two or three turns
along the gently winding garden walk, careful never to lose sight of a
certain row of windows, to which she seemed to give her whole attention;
then she sat down on a bench, a piece of elegant semi-rusticity made of
branches with the bark left on the wood. From the place where she sat
she could look through the garden railings along the inner boulevards to
the wonderful dome of the Invalides rising above the crests of a
forest of elm-trees, and see the less striking view of her own grounds
terminating in the gray stone front of one of the finest hotels in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Silence lay over the neighboring gardens, and the boulevards stretching
away to the Invalides. Day scarcely begins at noon in th