ke the Magdalen,--a Magdalen without loves, or
galas, or prodigalities, but not without beauty and fragrance. The net
came in at her feet full of fish; tench, barbels, pike, perch, and an
enormous carp, which floundered about on the grass.

"Madame brings luck!" exclaimed the keeper.

All the laborers opened their eyes as they looked with admiration at the
woman whose fairy wand seemed to have touched the nets. Just then the
huntsman was seen urging his horse over the meadows at a full gallop.
Fear took possession of her. Jacques was not with us, and the mother's
first thought, as Virgil so poetically says, is to press her children to
her breast when danger threatens.

"Jacques! Where is Jacques? What has happened to my boy?"

She did not love me! If she had loved me I should have seen upon her
face when confronted with my sufferings that expression of a lioness in
despair.

"Madame la comtesse, Monsieur le comte is worse."

She breathed more freely and started to run towards Clochegourde,
followed by me and by Madeleine.

"Follow me slowly," she said, looking back; "don't let the dear child
overheat herself. You see how it is; Monsieur de Mortsauf took that
walk in the sun which put him into a perspiration, and sitting under the
walnut-tree may be the cause of a great misfortune."

The words, said in the midst of her agitation, showed plainly the
purity of her soul. The death of the count a misfortune! She reached
Clochegourde with great rapidity, passing through a gap in the wall and
crossing the fields. I returned slowly. Henriette's words lighted my
mind, but as the lightning falls and blasts the gathered harvest. On
the river I had fancied I was her chosen one; now I felt bitterly the
sincerity of her words. The lover who is not everything is nothing. I
loved with the desire of a love that knows what it seeks; which feeds in
advance on coming transports, and is content with the pleasures of
the soul because it mingles with them others which the future keeps
in store. If Henriette loved, it was certain that she knew neither the
pleasures of love nor its tumults. She lived by feelings only, like a
saint with God. I was the object on which her thoughts fastened as
bees swarm upon the branch of a flowering tree. In my mad jealousy I
reproached myself that I had dared nothing, that I had not tightened
the bonds of a tenderness which seemed to me at that moment more subtile
than real, by the chains of positive p