mind, making her at the same time
very happy and very wretched. Good God! what she had suspected for a
moment, was then true. Afterward she had been convinced, seeing Pascal's
angry persistence, that he was speaking the truth; that between her and
work he had chosen work sincerely, like a man of science with whom love
of work has gained the victory over the love of woman. And yet he
had not spoken the truth; he had carried his devotion, his
self-forgetfulness to the point of immolating himself to what he
believed to be her happiness. And the misery of things willed that he
should have been mistaken, that he should have thus consummated the
unhappiness of both.

Clotilde again protested wildly:

"But how could I have known? I obeyed; I put all my love in my
obedience."

"Ah," cried Martine again, "it seems to me that I should have guessed."

Ramond interposed gently. He took Clotilde's hands once more in his, and
explained to her that grief might indeed have hastened the fatal issue,
but that the master had unhappily been doomed for some time past. The
affection of the heart from which he had suffered must have been of long
standing--a great deal of overwork, a certain part of heredity, and,
finally, his late absorbing love, and the poor heart had broken.

"Let us go upstairs," said Clotilde simply. "I wish to see him."

Upstairs in the death-chamber the blinds were closed, shutting out even
the melancholy twilight. On a little table at the foot of the bed burned
two tapers in two candlesticks. And they cast a pale yellow light on
Pascal's form extended on the bed, the feet close together, the hands
folded on the breast. The eyes had been piously closed. The face, of a
bluish hue still, but already looking calm and peaceful, framed by the
flowing white hair and beard, seemed asleep. He had been dead scarcely
an hour and a half, yet already infinite serenity, eternal silence,
eternal repose, had begun.

Seeing him thus, at the thought that he no longer heard her, that he no
longer saw her, that she was alone now, that she was to kiss him for the
last time, and then lose him forever, Clotilde, in an outburst of
grief, threw herself upon the bed, and in broken accents of passionate
tenderness cried:

"Oh, master, master, master--"

She pressed her lips to the dead man's forehead, and, feeling it still
warm with life, she had a momentary illusion: she fancied that he
felt this last caress, so cruelly awaited. Did