ressed by a chill sense of impending evil. He entered the room, and
saw at once that the inevitable end was come; Maurice lay dead on the
little bed; the hemorrhage predicted by Bouroche had done its work. The
red light of the setting sun streamed through the open window and rested
on the wall as if in a last farewell; two tapers were burning on a table
beside the bed. And Henriette, alone with her dead, in her widow's weeds
that she had not laid aside, was weeping silently.

At the noise of footsteps she raised her head, and shuddered on
beholding Jean. He, in his wild despair, was about to hurry toward her
and seize her hands, mingle his grief with hers in a sympathetic clasp,
but he saw the little hands were trembling, he felt as by instinct the
repulsion that pervaded all her being and was to part them for evermore.
Was not all ended between them now? Maurice's grave would be there, a
yawning chasm, to part them as long as they should live. And he could
only fall to his knees by the bedside of his dead friend, sobbing
softly. After the silence had lasted some moments, however, Henriette
spoke:

"I had turned my back and was preparing a cup of bouillon, when he gave
a cry. I hastened to his side, but had barely time to reach the bed
before he expired, with my name upon his lips, and yours as well, amid
an outgush of blood--"

Her Maurice, her twin brother, whom she might almost be said to have
loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over
and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen
her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death! And now cruel war
had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth
her way through life was to be a solitary one, widowed and forsaken as
she was, with no one upon whom to bestow her love.

"Ah, _bon sang_!" cried Jean, amid his sobs, "behold my work! My
poor little one, for whom I would have laid down my life, and whom I
murdered, brute that I am! What is to become of us? Can you ever forgive
me?"

At that moment their glances met, and they were stricken with
consternation at what they read in each other's eyes. The past rose
before them, the secluded chamber at Remilly, where they had spent so
many melancholy yet happy days. His dream returned to him, that dream
of which at first he had been barely conscious and which even at a later
period could not be said to have assumed definite shape: life down there
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