tried to defend her accomplice, who
lay unconscious in a chair.

"It is I that have done it all," cried she. "He is innocent."

Sauvresy turned pale with rage.

"Ah, really," said he, "my friend Hector is innocent! It wasn't he,
then, who, to pay me up--not for his life, for he was too cowardly
to kill himself; but for his honor, which he owes to me--took my
wife from me? Wretch! I hold out my hand to him when he is
drowning, I welcome him like a brother, and in return, he desolates
my hearth! . . . And you knew what you were doing, my friend Hector
--for I told you a hundred times that my wife was my all here below,
my present and my future, my dream and happiness and hope and very
life! You knew that for me to lose her was to die. But if you had
loved her--no, it was not that you loved her; you hated me. Envy
devoured you, and you could not tell me to my face, 'You are too
happy.' Then, like a coward, you dishonored me in the dark. Bertha
was only the instrument of your rancor; and she weighs upon you
to-day--you despise and fear her. My friend, Hector, you have been
in this house the vile lackey who thinks to avenge his baseness by
spitting upon the meats which he puts on his master's table!"

The count only responded by a shudder. The dying man's terrible
words fell more cruelly on his conscience than blows upon his cheek.

"See, Bertha," continued Sauvresy, "that's the man whom you have
preferred to me, and for whom you have betrayed me. You never
loved me--I see it now--your heart was never Mine. And I--I
loved you so! From the day I first saw you, you were my only
thought; as if your heart had beaten in place of Mine. Everything
about you was dear and precious to me; I adored your whims,
caprices, even your faults. There was nothing I would not do for
a smile from you, so that you would say to me, Thank you, between
two kisses. You don't know that for years after our marriage it
was my delight to wake up first so as to gaze upon you as you lay
asleep, to admire and touch your lovely hair, lying dishevelled
across the pillow. Bertha!"

He softened at the remembrance of these past joys, which would not
come again. He forgot their presence, the infamous treachery, the
poison; that he was about to die, murdered by this beloved wife;
and his eyes filled with tears, his voice choked.

Bertha, more motionless and pallid than marble, listened to him
breathlessly.

"It is true, then," continued the sick man, "