a moment's weakness.

"Let us go to him," she said; "anything is better than this."

"Rose, I dare not," was the wise reply.

But the next day early, Josephine took Rose to a door outside the house,
a door that had long been disused. Nettles grew before it. She produced
a key and with great difficulty opened this door. It led to the
tapestried chamber, and years ago they used to steal up it and peep into
the room.

Rose scarcely needed to be told that she was to watch Camille, and
report to her. In truth, it was a mysterious, vague protection against
a danger equally mysterious. Yet it made Josephine easier. But so
unflinching was her prudence that she never once could be prevailed on
to mount those stairs, and peep at Camille herself. "I must starve my
heart, not feed it," said she. And she grew paler and more hollow-eyed
day by day.

Yet this was the same woman who showed such feebleness and irresolution
when Raynal pressed her to marry him. But then dwarfs feebly drew
her this way and that. Now giants fought for her. Between a feeble
inclination and a feeble disinclination her dead heart had drifted
to and fro. Now honor, duty, gratitude,--which last with her was a
passion,--dragged her one way: love, pity, and remorse another.

Not one of these giants would relax his grasp, and nothing yielded
except her vital powers. Yes; her temper, one of the loveliest Heaven
ever gave a human creature, was soured at times.

Was it a wonder? There lay the man she loved pining for her; cursing her
for her cruelty, and alternately praying Heaven to forgive him and to
bless her: sighing, at intervals, all the day long, so loud, so deep, so
piteously, as if his heart broke with each sigh; and sometimes, for he
little knew, poor soul, that any human eye was upon him, casting aside
his manhood in his despair, and flinging himself on the very floor, and
muffling his head, and sobbing; he a hero.

And here was she pining in secret for him who pined for her? "I am not a
woman at all," said she, who was all woman. "I am crueller to him than a
tiger or any savage creature is to the victim she tears. I must cure him
of his love for me; and then die; for what shall I have to live for? He
weeps, he sighs, he cries for Josephine."

Her enforced cruelty was more contrary to this woman's nature than black
is to white, or heat to cold, and the heart rebelled furiously at times.
As when a rock tries to stem a current, the water fights it