s in you to come and ask me to save
you, so that you may throw yourself into the arms of another. It is
madness, when in order to tear you from Dionysia, I am ready to ruin
myself, provided only that you be lost to her forever."

"Wretch!" cried Jacques.

She looked at him with a mocking air, and her eyes beamed with infernal
audacity.

"You do not know me yet," she cried. "Go, speak, denounce me! M. Folgat
no doubt has told you how I can deny and defend myself."

Maddened by indignation, and excited to a point where reason loses its
power over us, Jacques de Boiscoran moved with uplifted hand towards the
countess, when suddenly a voice said,--

"Do not strike that woman!"

Jacques and the countess turned round, and uttered, both at the same
instant, the same kind of sharp, terrible cry, which must have been
heard a great distance.

In the frame of the door stood Count Claudieuse, a revolver in his hand,
and ready to fire.

He looked as pale as a ghost; and the white flannel dressing-gown which
he had hastily thrown around him hung like a pall around his lean limbs.
The first cry uttered by the countess had been heard by him on the bed
on which he lay apparently dying. A terrible presentiment had seized
him. He had risen from his bed, and, dragging himself slowly along,
holding painfully to the balusters, he had come down.

"I have heard all," he said, casting crushing looks at both the guilty
ones.

The countess uttered a deep, hoarse sigh, and sank into a chair. But
Jacques drew himself up, and said,--

"I have insulted you terribly, sir. Avenge yourself."

The count shrugged his shoulders.

"Great God! You would allow me to be condemned for a crime which I have
not committed. Ah, that would be the meanest cowardice."

The count was so feeble that he had to lean against the door-post.

"Would it be cowardly?" he asked. "Then, what do you call the act of
that miserable man who meanly, disgracefully robs another man of his
wife, and palms off his own children upon him? It is true you are
neither an incendiary nor an assassin. But what is fire in my house in
comparison with the ruin of all my faith? What are the wounds in my body
in comparison with that wound in my heart, which never can heal? I leave
you to the court, sir."

Jacques was terrified; he saw the abyss opening before him that was to
swallow him up.

"Rather death," he cried,--"death."

And, baring his breast, he said,--

"But why do