m the bed that the
song-book slipped from his knee and fell open upon the flags, then he
held his breath, and listened to some sound in the garden of roses
below. Yes, it was her step, no other human being's was like it, and
now her hand was upon the turret-door, now she crossed the dark and
narrow hall, now she opened the inner door and stepped over its
threshold into his small chamber.

As she entered, his eyes involuntarily fell, and he sought to disguise
his emotion by lifting from the floor the parchment-book that lay
between her and him, and now that he raised his eyes to her he started,
horror-stricken. For her face but lately blooming with youth and
health, had so changed in one short hour that she seemed to have
traversed years of hopeless grief.

"I disturb you, cousin," she said in a voice from which the music had
fled, "but I come to you because I think you are my friend--perhaps the
only one I have. Let me sit down, I am mortally weary. No, not on the
bed; my dear aunt died there. Oh, Jaufret, if I only knew that it would
be my death-bed too--and that my heart would grow still the moment I
lay down there--God is my witness I would throw myself upon it at
once!"

She sank down on the seat that he offered her, hiding her face in her
hands, and tears streaming between her white fingers. "For God's sake,
cousin," he cried, "you break my heart. What has happened? What has
your father said?"

Then she removed her hands from her face, pressed back her tears, and
looked steadfastly at him. "I will not weep," she said, "it is
childish. If all is true that I have heard, tears are too weak for such
sorrow. But I want to hear it from you, cousin. Is it indeed the case
that the Count of Malaspina is a beggar, and that his daughter has
nothing to call her own except the clothes she wears? You are silent,
Jaufret. Be it so then; what should I care for that? I have long had a
foreboding that there was trouble before me, and as to poverty, I have
seen _that_ in the convent, and know it, and it does not affright me.
But shame, Jaufret, shame--"

"By the blood of our Lord," he exclaimed. "Who dares to say that shame
threatens you so long as I can bear a sword, and lay a lance in rest?"

She did not appear to hear him. Then after a pause in which she, as if
unconsciously, drew her rosary through her hands, she shudderingly
enquired, "Do you know the Count de Gaillac?" The youth started as
though he had trodden upon a s