ning until night buried in grief, trying to recall a thousand things
of the dead, her familiar words, her face in earlier days, the gowns she
used to wear, as if she had stored her memory with relics; and from the
now buried past she gathered all the intimate and trivial recollections
with which to feed her cruel reveries. Then, when she had arrived at
such paroxysms of despair that she fell into hysterics and swooned, all
her accumulated grief broke forth in tears, flowing from her eyes by day
and by night.

One morning, when her maid entered, and opened the shutters after
raising the shades, asking: "How does Madame feel to-day?" she answered,
feeling exhausted from having wept so much: "Oh, not at all well!
Indeed, I can bear no more."

The servant, who was holding a tea-tray, looked at her mistress, and,
touched to see her lying so pale amide the whiteness of the bed, she
stammered, in a tone of genuine sadness: "Madame really looks very ill.
Madame would do well to take care of herself."

The tone in which this was said pierced the Countess's heart like a
sharp needle, and as soon as the maid had gone she rose to go and look
at her face in her large dressing-mirror.

She was stupefied at the sight of herself, frightened by her hollow
cheeks, her red eyes, the ravages produced in her by these days of
suffering. Her face, which she knew so well, which she had often looked
at in so many different mirrors, of which she knew all the expressions,
all the smiles, the pallor which she had already corrected so many
times, smoothing away the marks of fatigue, and the tiny wrinkles at the
corners of the eyes, visible in too strong a light--her face suddenly
seemed to her that of another woman, a new face that was distorted and
irreparably ill.

In order to see herself better, to be surer with regard to this
unexpected misfortune, she approached near enough to the mirror to touch
it with her forehead, so that her breath, spreading a light mist over
the glass, almost obscured the pale image she was contemplating. She was
compelled to take a handkerchief to wipe away this mist, and, trembling
with a strange emotion, she made a long and patient examination of the
alterations in her face. With a light finger she stretched the skin of
her cheeks, smoothed her forehead, pushed back her hair, and turned the
eyelids to look at the whites of her eyes. Then she opened her mouth and
examined her teeth which were a little tarnished w