prompts me to believe that you
also rejoice at our reunion."

The invalid looked very far from rejoicing; but the countess solaced
herself by interpreting his silence into an affirmative.

From that time he never breathed Madeleine's name in his mother's
presence; but those who watched beside him, often heard it murmured when
he slept, or just as he wakened, before full consciousness was restored.

From the day that he returned to the hotel, he sank into a state of deep
dejection. He would sit or lie for hours with his eyes wide open,
without apparently seeing or hearing what passed around him, while an
expression of despair overshadowed his deeply furrowed countenance.

The manifest weakness of his brain was a severer trial to Madame de
Gramont than his enfeebled bodily condition; but she dealt with it as
with her other trials; she would not acknowledge to herself the
existence of his mental malady; she refused to admit that he lacked
power to reason, at the very moment when she was exerting the species of
authority she would have employed to keep an unreasoning child in check.
The idea that it would be well to divert his mind, and render the hours
less tedious, never occurred to her, or, if it did, she was totally at a
loss to suggest any means of pleasantly whiling away the time. Her own
health had not wholly recovered from its recent shock; the slow fever
still lingered in her veins, but the daily routine of her life was as
unchanged as though her strength had been unimpaired.

Dr. Bayard had ordered his patient to drive out every day, and the
countess considered it her duty to accompany him. The pillows which Mrs.
Lawkins carefully placed for the support of the invalid were almost as
much needed by his mother; but she sat erect, and drew herself away from
them, as though the merest approach to a reclining posture would have
been a lapse from dignity. The count no longer gazed out of the window
with that calm look of enjoyment which Maurice and Madeleine had
remarked; he usually closed his eyes, or fixed them on his son, sitting
opposite, with a mournfully appealing look, which seemed to ask,--

"Can no help come to me? Will it _always_ be thus?"

Week after week passed on. Maurice, in spite of his unremitting
attention to his father, found time to pay daily visits to Madeleine.

She no longer made her appearance in the exhibition-rooms, or saw the
ladies who came to her establishment, upon business; but when