by the look on my face, she
turned to Madeleine with these angelic words, 'The happiness of others
is the joy of those who cannot themselves be happy,'--and the tone with
which she said them brought tears to my eyes. She falls, it is true, but
each time that her feet stumble she rises higher towards heaven."

Struck by the tone of the successive intimations chance had sent me,
and which in this great concert of misfortunes were like a prelude of
mournful modulations to a funereal theme, the mighty cry of expiring
love, I cried out: "Surely you believe that this pure lily cut from
earth will flower in heaven?"

"You left her still a flower," he answered, "but you will find her
consumed, purified by the forces of suffering, pure as a diamond buried
in the ashes. Yes, that shining soul, angelic star, will issue glorious
from the clouds and pass into the kingdom of the Light."

As I pressed the hand of the good evangelist, my heart overflowing with
gratitude, the count put his head, now entirely white, out of the door
and immediately sprang towards me with signs of surprise.

"She was right! He is here! 'Felix, Felix, Felix has come!' she kept
crying. My dear friend," he continued, beside himself with terror,
"death is here. Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one foot
in the grave?"

I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold
of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn, the
Abbe Birotteau stopped me.

"Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present," he said to me.

Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going,
all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette
gave them.

"What has happened?" cried the count, alarmed by the commotion, as much
from fear of the coming event as from the natural uneasiness of his
character.

"Only a sick woman's fancy," said the abbe. "Madame la comtesse does
not wish to receive monsieur le vicomte as she now is. She talks of
dressing; why thwart her?"

Manette came in search of Madeleine, whom I saw leave the house a few
moments after she had entered her mother's room. We were all, Jacques
and his father, the two abbes and I, silently walking up and down the
lawn in front of the house. I looked first at Montbazon and then at
Azay, noticing the seared and yellow valley which answered in its
mourning (as it ever did on all occasions) to the feelings of my heart.
Sudden