y symptoms of death. If he had looked under Desiree's
pillow, he would have found there a letter postmarked Cairo, wherein lay
the secret of that happy change. Four pages signed by Frantz, his whole
conduct confessed and explained to his dear little Zizi.

It was the very letter of which the sick girl had dreamed. If she had
dictated it herself, all the phrases likely to touch her heart, all the
delicately worded excuses likely to pour balm into her wounds, would
have been less satisfactorily expressed. Frantz repented, asked
forgiveness, and without making any promises, above all without asking
anything from her, described to his faithful friend his struggles, his
remorse, his sufferings.

What a misfortune that that letter had not arrived a few days earlier.
Now, all those kind words were to Desiree like the dainty dishes that
are brought too late to a man dying of hunger.

Suddenly she awoke, and, as we said a moment since, in an extraordinary
state.

In her head, which seemed to her lighter than usual, there suddenly
began a grand procession of thoughts and memories. The most distant
periods of her past seemed to approach her. The most trivial incidents
of her childhood, scenes that she had not then understood, words heard
as in a dream, recurred to her mind.

From her bed she could see her father and mother, one by her side,
the other in the workroom, the door of which had been left open. Mamma
Delobelle was lying back in her chair in the careless attitude of
long-continued fatigue, heeded at last; and all the scars, the ugly
sabre cuts with which age and suffering brand the faces of the
old, manifested themselves, ineffaceable and pitiful to see, in the
relaxation of slumber. Desiree would have liked to be strong enough to
rise and kiss that lovely, placid brow, furrowed by wrinkles which did
not mar its beauty.

In striking contrast to that picture, the illustrious Delobelle appeared
to his daughter through the open door in one of his favorite attitudes.
Seated before the little white cloth that bore his supper, with his body
at an angle of sixty-seven and a half degrees, he was eating and at the
same time running through a pamphlet which rested against the carafe in
front of him.

For the first time in her life Desiree noticed the striking lack of
harmony between her emaciated mother, scantily clad in little black
dresses which made her look even thinner and more haggard than she
really was, and her hap