r confusion. She stood
silent for a moment, then walked suddenly away, and falling on her
uncle's chair, fairly burst out sobbing. Denis was in the acme of
embarrassment. He looked round, as if to seek for inspiration, and
seeing a stool, plumped down upon it for something to do. There he sat,
playing with the guard of his rapier, and wishing himself dead a
thousand times over, and buried in the nastiest kitchen-heap in France.
His eyes wandered round the apartment, but found nothing to arrest
them. There were such wide spaces between the furniture, the light fell
so baldly and cheerlessly over all, the dark outside air looked in so
coldly through the windows, that he thought he had never seen a church
so vast nor a tomb so melancholy. The regular sobs of Blanche de
Maletroit measured out the time like the ticking of a clock. He read the
device upon the shield over and over again, until his eyes became
obscured; he stared into shadowy corners until he imagined they were
swarming with horrible animals; and every now and again he awoke with a
start, to remember that his last two hours were running, and death was
on the march.

Oftener and oftener, as the time went on, did his glance settle on the
girl herself. Her face was bowed forward and covered with her hands, and
she was shaken at intervals by the convulsive hiccup of grief. Even thus
she was not an unpleasant object to dwell upon, so plump, and yet so
fine, with a warm brown skin, and the most beautiful hair, Denis
thought, in the whole world of womankind. Her hands were like her
uncle's; but they were more in place at the end of her young arms, and
looked infinitely soft and caressing. He remembered how her blue eyes
had shone upon him full of anger, pity, and innocence. And the more he
dwelt on her perfections, the uglier death looked, and the more deeply
was he smitten with penitence at her continued tears. Now he felt that
no man could have the courage to leave a world which contained so
beautiful a creature; and now he would have given forty minutes of his
last hour to have unsaid his cruel speech.

Suddenly a hoarse and ragged peal of cockcrow rose to their ears from
the dark valley below the windows. And this shattering noise in the
silence of all around was like a light in a dark place, and shook them
both out of their reflections.

"Alas, can I do nothing to help you?" she said, looking up.

"Madam," replied Denis, with a fine irrelevancy, "if I have sa