tine, you must love me!'"

At these words, a deathly pallor spread over Christine's face, dark
rings formed round her eyes, she staggered and seemed on the point of
swooning. Raoul darted forward, with arms outstretched, but Christine
had overcome her passing faintness and said, in a low voice:

"Go on! Go on! Tell me all you heard!"

At an utter loss to understand, Raoul answered: "I heard him reply,
when you said you had given him your soul, 'Your soul is a beautiful
thing, child, and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a
gift. The angels wept tonight.'"

Christine carried her hand to her heart, a prey to indescribable
emotion. Her eyes stared before her like a madwoman's. Raoul was
terror-stricken. But suddenly Christine's eyes moistened and two great
tears trickled, like two pearls, down her ivory cheeks.

"Christine!"

"Raoul!"

The young man tried to take her in his arms, but she escaped and fled
in great disorder.

While Christine remained locked in her room, Raoul was at his wit's end
what to do. He refused to breakfast. He was terribly concerned and
bitterly grieved to see the hours, which he had hoped to find so sweet,
slip past without the presence of the young Swedish girl. Why did she
not come to roam with him through the country where they had so many
memories in common? He heard that she had had a mass said, that
morning, for the repose of her father's soul and spent a long time
praying in the little church and on the fiddler's tomb. Then, as she
seemed to have nothing more to do at Perros and, in fact, was doing
nothing there, why did she not go back to Paris at once?

Raoul walked away, dejectedly, to the graveyard in which the church
stood and was indeed alone among the tombs, reading the inscriptions;
but, when he turned behind the apse, he was suddenly struck by the
dazzling note of the flowers that straggled over the white ground.
They were marvelous red roses that had blossomed in the morning, in the
snow, giving a glimpse of life among the dead, for death was all around
him. It also, like the flowers, issued from the ground, which had
flung back a number of its corpses. Skeletons and skulls by the
hundred were heaped against the wall of the church, held in position by
a wire that left the whole gruesome stack visible. Dead men's bones,
arranged in rows, like bricks, to form the first course upon which the
walls of the sacristy had been built. The door of the sa