in my soul the sharp-eared vigilance that lies
with facility, and has the eyes of a lynx. It is not the lip of one I
love that drinks my tears and kisses them; my burning eyes are cooled
with water, and not with tender lips. It is my soul that acts a part,
and that perhaps is why I am dying! I lock up my griefs with so much
care that nothing is to be seen of it; it must eat into something, and
it has attacked my life.

"'I said to the doctors, who discovered my secret, "Make me die of some
plausible complaint, or I shall drag my husband with me."

"'So it is quite understood by M. Desplein, Bianchon, and myself that
I am dying of the softening of some bone which science has fully
described. Octave believes that I adore him, do you understand? So I am
afraid lest he should follow me. I now write to beg you in that case
to be the little Count's guardian. You will find with this a codicil in
which I have expressed my wish; but do not produce it excepting in case
of need, for perhaps I am fatuously vain. My devotion may perhaps leave
Octave inconsolable but willing to live.--Poor Octave! I wish him a
better wife than I am, for he deserves to be well loved.

"'Since my spiritual spy is married, I bid him remember what the florist
of the Rue Saint-Maur hereby bequeaths to him as a lesson: May your wife
soon be a mother! Fling her into the vulgarest materialism of household
life; hinder her from cherishing in her heart the mysterious flower
of the Ideal--of that heavenly perfection in which I believed, that
enchanted blossom with glorious colors, and whose perfume disgusts us
with reality. I am a Saint-Theresa who has not been suffered to live on
ecstasy in the depths of a convent, with the Holy Infant, and a spotless
winged angel to come and go as she wished.

"'You saw me happy among my beloved flowers. I did not tell you all: I
saw love budding under your affected madness, and I concealed from you
my thoughts, my poetry; I did not admit you to my kingdom of beauty.
Well, well; you will love my child for love of me if he should one day
lose his poor father. Keep my secrets as the grave will keep them. Do
not mourn for me; I have been dead this many a day, if Saint Bernard
was right in saying that where there is no more love there is no more
life.'"

"And the Countess died," said the Consul, putting away the letters and
locking the pocket-book.

"Is the Count still living?" asked the Ambassador, "for since the
revoluti