Thus Daniel and Henrietta saw a great deal of each other, and, to all
appearances, began to love each other.

"O God!" thought the countess, "why are they not a few years older?"

The poor lady had for some months been troubled by dismal presentiments.
She felt as if she would not live long; and she trembled at the idea of
leaving her child without any other protector but the count.

If Henrietta had at least known the truth, and, instead of admiring her
father as a man of superior ability, learned to mistrust his judgment!
A hundred times the countess was on the point of revealing her secret.
Alas! her great delicacy always kept her from doing so.

One night, as she returned from a great ball, she suddenly was seized
with vertigo. She did not think much of it, but sent for a cup of tea.

When it came, she was standing before the fireplace, undoing her hair;
but, instead of taking it, she suddenly raised her hand to her throat,
uttered a hoarse sound, and fell back.

They raised her up. In an instant the whole house was alive. They sent
for the doctors. All was in vain.

The Countess Ville-Handry had died from disease of the heart.

III.

Henrietta, roused by the noise all over the house, the voices in the
passages, and the steps on the staircase, and suspecting that some
accident had happened, had rushed at once into her mother's room.

There she had heard the doctors utter the fatal words,--

"All is over!"

There were five or six of them in the room; and one of them, his eyes
swollen from sleeplessness, and overcome with fatigue, had drawn the
count into a corner, and, pressing his hands, repeated over and over
again,--

"Courage, my dear sir, courage!"

He, overcome, with downcast eye, and cold perspiration on his pallid
brow, did not understand him; for he continued to stammer incessantly,--

"It is nothing, I hope. Did you not say it was nothing?"

There are misfortunes so terrible, so overwhelming in their suddenness,
that the stunned mind refuses to believe them, and denies their
genuineness in spite of their actual presence.

How could any one imagine or comprehend that the countess, who but a
moment ago was standing there full of life, in perfect health, and
the whole vigor of her years, apparently perfectly happy, smiling, and
beloved by all,--how could one conceive that she had all at once ceased
to exist?

They had laid her on her bed in her ball costume,--a blue satin dress
trim