g
thereat, she opened the door. In the dim light shed by an untrimmed,
smoking candle she saw nothing at first; but, upon looking more closely,
she discovered her maid lying in a heap at the foot of the bed.

Germinie was talking in her sleep. She was talking with a strange accent
that caused emotion, almost fear. The vague solemnity of supernatural
things, a breath from regions beyond this life, arose in the room, with
those words of sleep, involuntary, fugitive words, palpitating,
half-spoken, as if a soul without a body were wandering about a dead
man's lips. The voice was slow and deep, and had a far-off sound, with
long pauses of heavy breathing, and words breathed forth like sighs,
with now and then a vibrating, painful note that went to the heart,--a
voice laden with mystery and with the nervous tremor of the darkness, in
which the sleeper seemed to be groping for souvenirs of the past and
passing her hand over faces. "Oh! she loved me dearly," mademoiselle
heard her say. "And if he had not died we should be very happy now,
shouldn't we? No! no! But it's done, worse luck, and I don't want to
tell of it."

The words were followed by a nervous contraction of her features as if
she sought to seize her secret on the edge of her lips and force it
back.

Mademoiselle, with something very like terror, leaned over the poor,
forlorn body, powerless to direct its own acts, to which the past
returned as a ghost returns to a deserted house. She listened to the
confessions that were all ready to rush forth but were instinctively
checked, to the unconscious mind that spoke without restraint, to the
voice that did not hear itself. A sensation of horror came over her: she
felt as if she were beside a dead body haunted by a dream.

After a pause of some duration, and what seemed to be a sort of conflict
between the things that were present in her mind, Germinie apparently
turned her attention to the circumstances of her present life. The words
that escaped her, disjointed, incoherent words, were, as far as
mademoiselle could understand them, addressed to some person by way of
reproach. And as she talked on, her language became as unrecognizable as
her voice, which had taken on the tone and accent of the dreamer. It
rose above the woman, above her ordinary style, above her daily
expressions. It was the language of the people, purified and
transfigured by passion. Germinie accentuated words according to their
orthography; she