nature. Do not go
in; they are still there, and Bianchon is changing the dressings."

"Poor Adam! I ask myself if I have not sometimes pained him," she said.

"You have made him very happy," said Thaddeus; "you ought to be easy on
that score, for you have shown every indulgence for him."

"My loss would be irreparable."

"But, dear, you judged him justly."

"I was never blind to his faults," she said, "but I loved him as a wife
should love her husband."

"Then you ought, in case you lose him," said Thaddeus, in a voice which
Clementine had never heard him use, "to grieve for him less than if you
lost a man who was your pride, your love, and all your life,--as some
men are to you women. Surely you can be frank at this moment with a
friend like me. I shall grieve, too; long before your marriage I had
made him my child, I had sacrificed my life to him. If he dies I shall
be without an interest on earth; but life is still beautiful to a widow
of twenty-four."

"Ah! but you know that I love no one," she said, with the impatience of
grief.

"You don't yet know what it is to love," said Thaddeus.

"Oh, as husbands are, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my poor
Adam to a superior man. It is now over a month that we have been saying
to each other, 'Will he live?' and these alternations have prepared me,
as they have you, for this loss. I can be frank with you. Well, I would
give my life to save Adam. What is a woman's independence in Paris?
the freedom to let herself be taken in by ruined or dissipated men who
pretend to love her. I pray to God to leave me this husband who is so
kind, so obliging, so little fault-finding, and who is beginning to
stand in awe of me."

"You are honest, and I love you the better for it," said Thaddeus,
taking her hand which she yielded to him, and kissing it. "In solemn
moments like these there is unspeakable satisfaction in finding a woman
without hypocrisy. It is possible to converse with you. Let us look to
the future. Suppose that God does not grant your prayer,--and no one
cries to him more than I do, 'Leave me my friend!' Yes, these fifty
nights have not weakened me; if thirty more days and nights are needed
I can give them while you sleep,--yes, I will tear him from death if, as
the doctors say, nursing can save him. But suppose that in spite of you
and me, the count dies,--well, then, if you were loved, oh, adored, by a
man of a heart and soul that are worthy of you--"