be forgotten.

When morning dawned, Clemence had not yet slept. Her mind was absorbed
in the low murmur of a conversation which lasted several hours between
the brothers; but the thickness of the walls allowed no word which could
betray the object of this long conference to reach her ears. Monsieur
Desmarets, the notary, went away at last. The stillness of the night,
and the singular activity of the senses given by powerful emotion,
enabled Clemence to distinguish the scratching of a pen and the
involuntary movements of a person engaged in writing. Those who are
habitually up at night, and who observe the different acoustic effects
produced in absolute silence, know that a slight echo can be readily
perceived in the very places where louder but more equable and continued
murmurs are not distinct. At four o'clock the sound ceased. Clemence
rose, anxious and trembling. Then, with bare feet and without a wrapper,
forgetting her illness and her moist condition, the poor woman opened
the door softly without noise and looked into the next room. She saw her
husband sitting, with a pen in his hand, asleep in his arm-chair. The
candles had burned to the sockets. She slowly advanced and read on an
envelope, already sealed, the words, "This is my will."

She knelt down as if before an open grave and kissed her husband's hand.
He woke instantly.

"Jules, my friend, they grant some days to criminals condemned to
death," she said, looking at him with eyes that blazed with fever and
with love. "Your innocent wife asks only two. Leave me free for two
days, and--wait! After that, I shall die happy--at least, you will
regret me."

"Clemence, I grant them."

Then, as she kissed her husband's hands in the tender transport of her
heart, Jules, under the spell of that cry of innocence, took her in his
arms and kissed her forehead, though ashamed to feel himself still under
subjection to the power of that noble beauty.

On the morrow, after taking a few hours' rest, Jules entered his wife's
room, obeying mechanically his invariable custom of not leaving the
house without a word to her. Clemence was sleeping. A ray of light
passing through a chink in the upper blind of a window fell across the
face of the dejected woman. Already suffering had impaired her forehead
and the freshness of her lips. A lover's eye could not fail to notice
the appearance of dark blotches, and a sickly pallor in place of
the uniform tone of the cheeks and the