affectation with many
others.

Before this letter was read, she finished her deposition, and ended it
with some assertions which perplexed me considerably; for I could no
longer distinguish the boundary between truth and perfidy.

"Ever since her accident," she said, "mademoiselle has been hovering
between life and death. She will certainly never recover, whatever the
doctors may declare. I venture to say that these gentlemen, who only see
the patient at certain hours, do not understand her illness as well as
I, who have never left her for a single night. They pretend that her
wounds are going on well and that her head is deranged; whereas I say
that her wounds are going on badly, and that her head is better than
they say. Mademoiselle very rarely talks irrationally, and if by chance
she does, it is in the presence of these gentlemen, who confuse and
frighten her. She then makes such efforts not to appear mad that she
actually becomes so; but as soon as they leave her alone with me or
Saint-Jean or Monsieur l'Abbe, who could quite well have told you how
things are, if he had wished, she becomes calm again, and sweet and
sensible as usual. She says that she could almost die of pain, although
to the doctors she pretends that she is scarcely suffering at all.
And then she speaks of her murderer with the generosity that becomes a
Christian; a hundred times a day she will say:

"'May God pardon him in the next life as I pardon him in this! After
all, a man must be very fond of a woman to kill her! I was wrong not to
marry him; perhaps he would have made me happy. I drove him to despair
and he has avenged himself on me. Dear Leblanc, take care never to
betray the secret I have told you. A single indiscreet word might send
him to the scaffold, and that would be the death of my father.'

"The poor young lady is far from imagining that things have come to this
pass; that I have been summoned by the law and my religion to make known
what I would rather conceal; and that, instead of going out to get an
apparatus for her shower-baths, I have come here to confess the truth.
The only thing that consoles me is that it will be easy to hide all this
from M. le Chevalier, who has no more sense now than a babe just born.
For myself, I have done my duty; may God be my judge!"

After speaking thus with perfect self-possession and great volubility,
Mademoiselle Leblanc sat down again amid a murmur of approbation, and
they proceeded to r