illness, if she were worse and seemed near dying, Claes was the
only person in the house or in the town who remained ignorant of it.
Lemulquinier knew it, but neither the daughters, bound to silence by
their mother, nor Josephine herself let Balthazar know the danger of the
being he had once so passionately loved.

When his heavy step sounded in the gallery as he came to dinner, Madame
Claes was happy--she was about to see him! and she gathered up her
strength for that happiness. As he entered, the pallid face blushed
brightly and recovered for an instant the semblance of health. Balthazar
came to her bedside, took her hand, saw the misleading color on her
cheek, and to him she seemed well. When he asked, "My dear wife, how are
you to-day?" she answered, "Better, dear friend," and made him think she
would be up and recovered on the morrow. His preoccupation was so great
that he accepted this reply, and believed the illness of which his wife
was dying a mere indisposition. Dying to the eyes of the world, in his
alone she was living.

A complete separation between husband and wife was the result of this
year. Claes slept in a distant chamber, got up early in the morning, and
shut himself into his laboratory or his study. Seeing his wife only in
presence of his daughters or of the two or three friends who came to
visit them, he lost the habit of communicating with her. These two
beings, formerly accustomed to think as one, no longer, unless at rare
intervals, enjoyed those moments of communion, of passionate unreserve
which feed the life of the heart; and finally there came a time when
even these rare pleasures ceased. Physical suffering was now a boon
to the poor woman, helping her to endure the void of separation, which
might have killed her had she been truly living. Her bodily pain became
so great that there were times when she was joyful in the thought that
he whom she loved was not a witness of it. She lay watching Balthazar
in the evening hours, and knowing him happy in his own way, she lived
in the happiness she had procured for him,--a shadowy joy, and yet it
satisfied her. She no longer asked herself if she were loved, she forced
herself to believe it; and she glided over that icy surface, not daring
to rest her weight upon it lest it should break and drown her soul in a
gulf of awful nothingness.

No events stirred the calm of this existence; the malady that was slowly
consuming Madame Claes added to the hous