ping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn.

"My child," he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandoned
to him, "I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing her
head. In spite of the repeated assurances of the doctors, she is
alarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had the
Cure sent for. Do you wish to see him?"

"Pray let me see him!"

[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blue
eyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singular that he felt
frozen to the marrow.

He could not help saying with deep emotion, "Do you love me no longer,
Aliette?"

"For ever!" murmured the poor child.

He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She saw tears
stealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised.

Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.
Less than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle
Tallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that
Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which he
now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M.
de Rance, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead
mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely have
taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "A head so
charming as yours," Bernard had assured her tenderly, "does not need to
be dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the few pages that remain,
will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of
presentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April
Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass a
week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they have
kept Aliette's room under lock and key since [235] the day when she
left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time.
There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette!
why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle
creed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of
honesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to
me like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room!
What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look
almos