end was
come. The secret could not be kept long. Even while she administered the
medicine with shaking hands, while with tears in her voice she strove
to still the patient and silence her wild words, even while she
restrained by force the feeble strength that would and could not, while
in a word she omitted no precaution, relaxed no effort, her heart told
her with every pulsation that the end was come.

And presently, when Madame was quiet and slept, the girl bowed her head
over the unconscious object of her love and wept, bitterly,
passionately, wetting with her tears the long grey hair that strewed the
pillow, as she recalled with pitiful clearness all the stages of
concealment, all the things which she had done to avert this end.
Vainly, futilely, for it was come. The dark mornings of winter recurred
to her mind, those mornings when she had risen and dressed herself by
rushlight, with this fear redoubling the chill gloom of the cold house;
the nights, too, when all had been well, and in the last hour before
sleep, finding her mother sane and cheerful, she had nursed the hope
that the latest attack might be the last. The evenings brightened by
that hope, the mornings darkened by its extinction, the rare hours of
brooding, the days and weeks of brave struggle, of tendance never
failing, of smiles veiling a sick heart--she lived all these again,
looking pitifully back, straining tenderly in her arms the dear being
she loved.

And then, stabbing her back to life in the midst of her exhaustion, the
thought pierced her that even now she was hastening the end by her
absence. They would be asking for her below; they must be asking for her
already. The supper-time was come, was past, perhaps; and she was not
there! She tried to picture what would happen, what already must be
happening; and rising and dashing the tears from her face she stood
listening. Perhaps Claude would make some excuse to the others; or,
perhaps--how much had he guessed?

Her mother was passive now, sunk in the torpor which followed the
attack and from which the poor woman would awake in happy
unconsciousness of the whole. Anne saw that her charge might be left,
and hastily smoothing the tangle of luxuriant hair which had fallen
about her face, she opened the door. Another might have stayed to allay
the fever of her cheeks, to remove the traces of her tears, to stay the
quivering of her hands; but such small cares were not for her, nor for
the occasio