knows nothing of my sufferings and she aggravates them; but I forgive
her. It is a dreadful thing to say, my friend, but a less virtuous woman
might have made me more happy by lending herself to consolations which
Blanche never thinks of, for she is as silly as a child. Moreover my
servants torment me; blockheads who take my French for Greek! When our
fortune was finally remade inch by inch, and I had some relief from
care, it was too late, the harm was done; I had reached the period when
the appetite is vitiated. Then came my severe illness, so ill-managed by
Origet. In short, I have not six months to live."

I listened to the count in terror. On meeting the countess I had been
struck with her yellow skin and the feverish brilliancy of her eyes.
I led the count towards the house while seeming to listen to his
complaints and his medical dissertations; but my thoughts were all with
Henriette, and I wanted to observe her. We found her in the salon, where
she was listening to a lesson in mathematics which the Abbe Dominis
was giving Jacques, and at the same time showing Madeleine a stitch of
embroidery. Formerly she would have laid aside every occupation the day
of my arrival to be with me. But my love was so deeply real that I drove
back into my heart the grief I felt at this contrast between the past
and the present, and thought only of the fatal yellow tint on that
celestial face, which resembled the halo of divine light Italian
painters put around the faces of their saints. I felt the icy wind of
death pass over me. Then when the fire of her eyes, no longer softened
by the liquid light in which in former times they moved, fell upon me,
I shuddered; I noticed several changes, caused by grief, which I had not
seen in the open air. The slender lines which, at my last visit, were
so lightly marked upon her forehead had deepened; her temples with their
violet veins seemed burning and concave; her eyes were sunk beneath the
brows, their circles browned;--alas! she was discolored like a fruit
when decay is beginning to show upon the surface, or a worm is at the
core. I, whose whole ambition had been to pour happiness into her soul,
I it was who embittered the spring from which she had hoped to refresh
her life and renew her courage. I took a seat beside her and said in a
voice filled with tears of repentance, "Are you satisfied with your own
health?"

"Yes," she answered, plunging her eyes into mine. "My health is there,"
sh