omise me, Flor.'

"I pressed his hand between both mine. I could not speak, for I felt as
if ten millstones had fallen on my heart. He gently drew away his hand
and left the room. Where he went, I never could find out. Nobody knew
where the others were that evening. Count Henry did not come down to
supper, Mamsell Gabrielle's brother did not return, and she herself was
walking in the woods long after dark.

"As soon as my trembling legs would carry me, I went over to my own
room; I wanted to hear or to see nothing of nobody--least of all, of
Mamsell Gabrielle. That evening I hated her with all my heart and soul.

"'If the earth would only open and swallow her up!' I thought to myself
a hundred times. 'If the woods would only fall upon her and crush her,
before she should come between father and son, to estrange them still
more than they already are!' I upbraided myself bitterly for having
been melted by her pale face and her mourning, and taken her into the
house, although I had felt a secret warning at the time; and then I
thought of my own Count Ernest, how he was wandering all night about
the woods half mad with grief--looking on his boyhood's brightest
dream--on the only thing he had ever set his heart on--as some
unnatural sin--perhaps--who knows?--as an offence to all he held most
sacred. 'What will be the end of it all?' I lamented to myself, as I
wrung my hands, and I felt as if the coming morning were to dawn on the
day of judgment!

"When I heard the girl go past my door at bedtime, I shook all over
with my hate and horror of her. If she had happened to come in, I
really do not know what I should have done to her. If my boy had been
poisoned by her, I don't think I could have hated her more. I could not
conceive how I had been so blind.

"Not to call myself a fool, I called her all the names I knew. I abused
her for the most horrid hypocrite, the sliest creature that ever
ensnared a man or deceived a woman. I tied a great silk handkerchief
over my head, that I might not hear her in her room, or be an unwilling
witness if anybody came to her in the night.

"If anybody _did_, I did not know it. I had lighted my lamp and taken
out my hymn-book; but, God forgive me, I did not know what I was
reading. And I was hungry too, for I had not gone down to supper, and
that made me feel still crosser with the girl.

"As for my master, I never thought of blaming anything he did. I had
broken myself of _that_, years