went, Raphael read his own
death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, brought all at once to a sense of
his real position, Valentin sat down on the threshold, locked his arms
across his chest, and bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in
alarm, with "My Lord----"

"Go away, go away," cried the invalid.

In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat
down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path
along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the
hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious
power interpreted for him all the woman's forebodings, and filled the
breeze and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled with horror, he
took refuge among the highest summits of the mountains, and stayed
there till the evening; but yet he could not drive away the gloomy
presentiments awakened within him in such an unfortunate manner by a
cruel solicitude on his account.

The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before him like a shadow
in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet within him found a vague
resemblance between her black and white striped petticoat and the bony
frame of a spectre.

"The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop out there, you
will go off just like rotten fruit. You must come in. It isn't healthy
to breathe the damp, and you have taken nothing since the morning,
besides."

"_Tonnerre de Dieu_! old witch," he cried; "let me live after my own
fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. It is quite bad
enough to dig my grave every morning; you might let it alone in the
evenings at least----"

"Your grave, sir! I dig your grave!--and where may your grave be? I want
to see you as old as father there, and not in your grave by any
manner of means. The grave! that comes soon enough for us all; in the
grave----"

"That is enough," said Raphael.

"Take my arm, sir."

"No."

The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and
it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. Hatred is a tonic--it
quickens life and stimulates revenge; but pity is death to us--it makes
our weakness weaker still. It is as if distress simpered ingratiatingly
at us; contempt lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness in an affront.
In the centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a wondering pity in the
child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman, and in her husband a pity
that had an interes