But when she heard
the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish at the moment when her
heart was breaking, her courage came back to her; she resolved to
struggle with that awful power which had torn a lover from her arms, a
father from her children, a fortune from their home, happiness from all.
And yet she could not repress a trepidation which made her quiver; in
all her life no such solemn scene as this had taken place. This dreadful
moment--did it not virtually contain her future, and gather within it
all the past?

Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies
the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily before
the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the rush of
thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the feelings
under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her husband slowly
crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women know that agony of
inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was writhing. Even one whose
heart has been tried by nothing worse than the declaration to a husband
of some extravagance, or a debt to a dress-maker, will understand how
its pulses swell and quicken when the matter is one of life itself.

A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her husband's
feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief; but to Madame
Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her fears. When she
saw Balthazar about to leave the room, her impulse was to spring towards
him; then a cruel thought restrained her--she should stand before him!
would she not seem ridiculous in the eyes of a man no longer under the
glamour of love--who might see true? She resolved to avoid all dangerous
chances at so solemn a moment, and remained seated, saying in a clear
voice,

"Balthazar."

He turned mechanically and coughed; then, paying no attention to his
wife, he walked to one of the little square boxes that are placed at
intervals along the wainscoting of every room in Holland and Belgium,
and spat in it. This man, who took no thought of other persons, never
forgot the inveterate habit of using those boxes. To poor Josephine,
unable to find a reason for this singularity, the constant care which
her husband took of the furniture caused her at all times an unspeakable
pang, but at this moment the pain was so violent that it put her beside
herself and made her exclaim in a tone of impatience, which expresse