n all the purity of her soul,
which was so transparent--the decision to give herself to him freely.

"Tell me!" he murmured.

There was almost a smile on her mouth, the mouth to which supplications
had been offered as to an altar.

The dying man, feeling that she was about to accept, murmured:

"I love life." He shook his head. "I have so little time left, so
little time that I do not want to sleep at night any more."

Then he paused and waited for her to speak.

"Yes," she said, and lightly touched--hardly grazed--the old man's hand
with her own.

And in spite of myself, my inexorable, attentive eye could not help
detecting the stamp of theatrical solemnity, of conscious grandeur in
her gesture. Even though devoted and chaste, without any ulterior
motive, her sacrifice had a self-glorifying pride, which I perceived--I
who saw everything.

. . . . .

In the boarding-house, the strangers were the sole topic of
conversation. They occupied three rooms and had a great deal of
baggage, and the man seemed to be very rich, though simple in his
tastes. They were to stay in Paris until the young woman's delivery,
in a month or so. She expected to go to a hospital nearby. But the
man was very ill, they said. Madame Lemercier was extremely annoyed.
She was afraid he would die in her house. She had made arrangements by
correspondence, otherwise she would not have taken these people in--in
spite of the tone that their wealth might give to her house. She hoped
he would last long enough to be able to leave. But when you spoke to
her, she seemed to be worried.

When I saw him again, I felt he was really going to die soon. He sat
in his chair, collapsed, with his elbows on the arms of the chair and
his hands drooping. It seemed difficult for him to look at things, and
he held his face bowed down, so that the light from the window did not
reveal his pupils, but only the edge of the lower lids, which gave the
impression of his eyes having been put out. I remembered what the poet
had said, and I trembled before this man whose life was over, who
reviewed almost his entire existence like a terrible sovereign, and was
wrapped in a beauty that was of God.

CHAPTER IX

Some one knocked at the door.

It was time for the doctor. The sick man raised himself uncertainly in
awe of the master.

"How have you been to-day?"

"Bad."

"Well, well," the doctor said lightly.

They were left alone together. Th