imself permeated by the coldest and most deathly shuddering
horror. Even when he had regained some calmness, he could not but
confess to himself that the profound horribleness of the Baroness, even
now that she was dead, cast a deep shadow over his life, sun-bright as
it otherwise seemed to be.

In a very short time Aurelia began to alter very perceptibly. Whilst
the deathly paleness of her face, and the fatigued appearance of
her eyes, seemed to point to sortie bodily ailment, her mental
state--confused, variable, restless, as if she were constantly
frightened at something--led to the conclusion that there was some
fresh mystery perturbing her system. She shunned her husband. She shut
herself up in her rooms, sought the most solitary walks in the park.
And when she then allowed herself to be seen, her eyes, red with
weeping, her contorted features, gave unmistakable evidence of some
terrible suffering which she had been undergoing. It was in vain that
the Count took every possible pains to discover the cause of this
condition of hers, and the only thing which had any effect in bringing
him out of the hopeless state into which those remarkable symptoms of
his wife's had plunged him, was the deliberate opinion of a celebrated
doctor, that this strangely excited condition of the Countess was
nothing other than the natural result of a bodily state which indicated
the happy result of a fortunate marriage. This doctor, on one occasion
when he was at table with the Count and Countess, permitted himself
sundry allusions to this presumed state of what the German nation
calls "good hope." The Countess seemed to listen to all this with
indifference for some time. But suddenly her attention became vividly
awakened when the doctor spoke of the wonderful longings which women in
that condition become possessed by, and which they cannot resist
without the most injurious effects supervening upon their own health,
and even upon that of the child. The Countess overwhelmed the doctor
with questions, and the latter did not weary of quoting the strangest
and most entertaining cases of this description from his own practice
and experience.

"Moreover," he said, "there are cases on record in which women have
been led, by these strange, abnormal longings, to commit most terrible
crimes. There was a certain blacksmith's wife, who had such an
irresistible longing for her husband's flesh that, one night, when he
came home the worse for liquor,