strength to oppose her tyrant,
"swear to me that if you never meet him you will do nothing to injure
him. Can I trust your word as a nobleman for that?"

"What does all this mean?" said the count.

"If you will not swear, kill us now together!" cried the countess,
falling on her knees and pressing her child to her breast.

"Rise, madame. I give you my word as a man of honor to do nothing
against the life of that cursed child, provided he lives among the rocks
between the sea and the house, and never crosses my path. I will give
him that fisherman's house down there for his dwelling, and the beach
for a domain. But woe betide him if I ever find him beyond those
limits."

The countess began to weep.

"Look at him!" she said. "He is your son."

"Madame!"

At that word, the frightened mother carried away the child whose heart
was beating like that of a bird caught in its nest. Whether innocence
has a power which the hardest men cannot escape, or whether the count
regretted his violence and feared to plunge into despair a creature so
necessary to his pleasures and also to his worldly prosperity, it is
certain that his voice was as soft as it was possible to make it when
his wife returned.

"Jeanne, my dear," he said, "do not be angry with me; give me your hand.
One never knows how to trust you women. I return, bringing you fresh
honors and more wealth, and yet, tete-Dieu! you receive me like an
enemy. My new government will oblige me to make long absences until I
can exchange it for that of Lower Normandy; and I request, my dear, that
you will show me a pleasant face while I am here."

The countess understood the meaning of the words, the feigned softness
of which could no longer deceive her.

"I know my duty," she replied in a tone of sadness which the count
mistook for tenderness.

The timid creature had too much purity and dignity to try, as some
clever women would have done, to govern the count by putting calculation
into her conduct,--a sort of prostitution by which noble souls feel
degraded. Silently she turned away, to console her despair with Etienne.

"Tete-Dieu! shall I never be loved?" cried the count, seeing the tears
in his wife's eyes as she left the room.

Thus incessantly threatened, motherhood became to the poor woman a
passion which assumed the intensity that women put into their guilty
affections. By a species of occult communion, the secret of which is in
the hearts of mothers, the child