e approached
the bed with so strange a motion that the countess thought her last hour
had come.

"Ah! don't kill us!" she cried, "leave me my child, and I will love you
well."

"You must feel yourself very guilty to offer as the ransom of your
faults the love you owe me."

The count's voice was lugubrious and the bitter words were enforced by a
look which fell like lead upon the countess.

"My God!" she cried sorrowfully, "can innocence be fatal?"

"Your death is not in question," said her master, coming out of a sort
of reverie into which he had fallen. "You are to do exactly, and for
love of me, what I shall now tell you."

He flung upon the bed one of the two masks he had taken from the chest,
and smiled with derision as he saw the gesture of involuntary fear which
the slight shock of the black velvet wrung from his wife.

"You will give me a puny child!" he cried. "Wear that mask on your face
when I return. I'll have no barber-surgeon boast that he has seen the
Comtesse d'Herouville."

"A man!--why choose a man for the purpose?" she said in a feeble voice.

"Ho! ho! my lady, am I not master here?" replied the count.

"What matters one horror the more!" murmured the countess; but her
master had disappeared, and the exclamation did her no injury.

Presently, in a brief lull of the storm, the countess heard the gallop
of two horses which seemed to fly across the sandy dunes by which the
castle was surrounded. The sound was quickly lost in that of the waves.
Soon she felt herself a prisoner in the vast apartment, alone in the
midst of a night both silent and threatening, and without succor against
an evil she saw approaching her with rapid strides. In vain she sought
for some stratagem by which to save that child conceived in tears,
already her consolation, the spring of all her thoughts, the future of
her affections, her one frail hope.

Sustained by maternal courage, she took the horn with which her husband
summoned his men, and, opening a window, blew through the brass tube
feeble notes that died away upon the vast expanse of water, like a
bubble blown into the air by a child. She felt the uselessness of that
moan unheard of men, and turned to hasten through the apartments, hoping
that all the issues were not closed upon her. Reaching the library she
sought in vain for some secret passage; then, passing between the long
rows of books, she reached a window which looked upon the courtyard.
Again she soun