n?" she asked with anxious
tenderness, without venturing to advance into the room.

"Oh, you can come in," he said with a dejected gesture. "I won't beat
you. I have not the strength to do that now."

And from this day on he tolerated her about him, and allowed her to wait
on him. But he had caprices still. He would not let her enter the room
when he was in bed, possessed by a sort of morbid shame; then he made
her send him Martine. But he seldom remained in bed, dragging himself
about from chair to chair, in his utter inability to do any kind of
work. His malady continued to grow worse, until at last he was reduced
to utter despair, tortured by sick headaches, and without the strength,
as he said, to put one foot before the other, convinced every morning
that he would spend the night at the Tulettes, a raving maniac. He grew
thin; his face, under its crown of white hair--which he still cared
for through a last remnant of vanity--acquired a look of suffering,
of tragic beauty. And although he allowed himself to be waited on, he
refused roughly all remedies, in the distrust of medicine into which he
had fallen.

Clotilde now devoted herself to him entirely. She gave up everything
else; at first she attended low mass, then she left off going to church
altogether. In her impatience for some certain happiness, she felt as if
she were taking a step toward that end by thus devoting all her moments
to the service of a beloved being whom she wished to see once more well
and happy. She made a complete sacrifice of herself, she sought to
find happiness in the happiness of another; and all this unconsciously,
solely at the impulse of her woman's heart, in the midst of the crisis
through which she was still passing, and which was modifying her
character profoundly, without her knowledge. She remained silent
regarding the disagreement which separated them. The idea did not again
occur to her to throw herself on his neck, crying that she was his, that
he might return to life, since she gave herself to him. In her thoughts
she grieved to see him suffer; she was only an affectionate girl,
who took care of him, as any female relative would have done. And
her attentions were very pure, very delicate, occupying her life so
completely that her days now passed swiftly, exempt from tormenting
thoughts of the Beyond, filled with the one wish of curing him.

But where she had a hard battle to fight was in prevailing upon him
to use his hyp