ht, but burning; as I took her in my arms I felt the
heat of her body. Monsieur Deslandes entered and seemed surprised at the
decoration of the room; but seeing me, all was explained to him.

"We must suffer much to die," she said in a changed voice.

The doctor sat down and felt her pulse, then he rose quickly and said a
few words in a low voice to the priest, who left the room beckoning me
to follow him.

"What are you going to do?" I said to the doctor.

"Save her from intolerable agony," he replied. "Who could have believed
in so much strength? We cannot understand how she can have lived in this
state so long. This is the forty-second day since she has either eaten
or drunk."

Monsieur Deslandes called for Manette. The Abbe Birotteau took me to the
gardens.

"Let us leave her to the doctor," he said; "with Manette's help he will
wrap her in opium. Well, you have heard her now--if indeed it is she
herself."

"No," I said, "it is not she."

I was stupefied with grief. I left the grounds by the little gate of the
lower terrace and went to the punt, in which I hid to be alone with my
thoughts. I tried to detach myself from the being in which I lived,--a
torture like that with which the Tartars punish adultery by fastening a
limb of the guilty man in a piece of wood and leaving him with a knife
to cut it off if he would not die of hunger. My life was a failure, too!
Despair suggested many strange ideas to me. Sometimes I vowed to die
beside her; sometimes to bury myself at Meilleraye among the Trappists.
I looked at the windows of the room where Henriette was dying, fancying
I saw the light that was burning there the night I betrothed my soul to
hers. Ah! ought I not to have followed the simple life she had created
for me, keeping myself faithfully to her while I worked in the world?
Had she not bidden me become a great man expressly that I might be
saved from base and shameful passions? Chastity! was it not a sublime
distinction which I had not know how to keep? Love, as Arabella
understood it, suddenly disgusted me. As I raised my humbled head asking
myself where, in future, I could look for light and hope, what interest
could hold me to life, the air was stirred by a sudden noise. I turned
to the terrace and there saw Madeleine walking alone, with slow steps.
During the time it took me to ascend the terrace, intending to ask the
dear child the reason of the cold look she had given me when kneeling at
the foo