, it was I who stood in
peril of death. My friends sent for a priest and I confessed."

The girl opened her eyes in wonder and a kind of derision, for she did
not belong to the aristocratic creed.

"Confessed?" reiterated she; "ah, yes; people confess when they are very
bad. Was it a complete confession, madame?" she saucily inquired.

"Complete as all believers should make when on the brink of the grave,"
replied Madame Clemenceau, in her gravest tone to repress the tendency
to frivolity, for she had not resented the incredulity as regarded
herself.

"I dare say," said Hedwig, who certainly had one of her lucid intervals,
"it is as when a body is traveling, one is in such a hurry that
something is forgotten. You went away so sharply that you forgot to say
good-bye to the master! if you spoke at all! Whatever did the
father-confessor say?"

"He gave me very good advice."

"Which you are following, madame?"

"When one not only has seen death smite another beside one but flit
close by oneself, I assure you, girl, it forces one to reflect. Oh, how
dreadful the nights are in the sick chamber, with a night-light dimly
burning and the sufferer moaning and tossing! Then my turn came to
occupy the patient's position, and it was frightful. Can you not see I
am much altered--horrid, in fact?"

Hedwig shook her head; without flattery, well as her mistress assumed
the air of languor, her figure had not been affected by any event since
the slaying of the Viscount Gratian, and her countenance was unmarred by
any change except a trifling pallor.

"Yes; after my uncle grew better, I was indisposed and should have died
but for the cares of an old friend, Madame Lesperon the Female Bard. But
you would not know this favorite of the Muses. You are not poetically
inclined, Hedwig!" she added, laughingly. Rising with animation, "but
that makes no matter! I am glad to see you home again. I thought of you,
Hedwig, and I have bought you something pretty to wear on your days
out--bought it in Paris, too."

"Is that so?" exclaimed the girl, much less absent and saucy in the curl
of her lip; "you are always kind."

"Yes; they are in my new trunk, for which you had better send the
gardener at once. He is not forgotten either. There is a set of jewelry,
too, in the old Teutonic style. They say now in Paris that any idea of
war between France and Prussia is absurd, and there is a revulsion in
feeling--the vogue is all for German things.