rect the operation.

"No, no, don't leave him there. There is a bed in the next room. We will
take him up very gently with the mattress, and lay him with it on the
bed."

It was Maurice's room; it was the bed in which Maurice had died, and
which Constance with maternal piety had kept unchanged, consecrating the
room to her son's memory. But what could she say? How could she prevent
Blaise from dying there in his turn, killed by her?

The abomination of it all, the vengeance of destiny which exacted this
sacrilege, filled her with such a feeling of revolt that at the moment
when vertigo was about to seize her and the flooring began to flee from
beneath her feet, she was lashed by it and kept erect. And then she
displayed extraordinary strength, will, and insolent courage. When the
stricken man passed before her, her puny little frame stiffened and
grew. She looked at him, and her yellow face remained motionless, save
for a flutter of her eyelids and an involuntary nervous twinge on the
left side of her mouth, which forced a slight grimace. But that was all,
and again she became perfect both in words and gesture, doing and saying
what was necessary without lavishness, but like one simply thunderstruck
by the suddenness of the catastrophe.

However, the orders had been carried out in the bedroom, and the bearers
withdrew greatly upset. Down below, directly the accident had been
discovered, old Moineaud had been told to take a cab and hasten to Dr.
Boutan's to bring him back with a surgeon, if one could be found on the
way.

"All the same, I prefer to have him here rather than in the basement,"
Beauchene repeated mechanically as he stood before the bed. "He still
breathes. There! see, it is quite apparent. Who knows? Perhaps Boutan
may be able to pull him through, after all."

Denis, however, entertained no illusions. He had taken one of his
brother's cold yielding hands in his own and he could feel that it was
again becoming a mere thing, as if broken, wrenched away from life
in that great fall. For a moment he remained motionless beside the
death-bed, with the mad hope they he might, perhaps, by his clasp infuse
a little of the blood in his own heart into the veins of the dying man.
Was not that blood common to them both? Had not their twin brotherhood
drunk life from the same source? It was the other half of himself that
was about to die. Down below, after raising a loud cry of heartrending
distress, he had said n