at I shall tell you now is dreadful, I know--but
I am glad to have no child; I do not wish for any. I feel I am more wife
than mother. Well, then, can you fear? Listen to me, my own beloved,
promise to forget, not this hour of mingled tenderness and doubt, but
the words of that madman. Jules, you _must_. Promise me not to see him,
not to go to him. I have a deep conviction that if you set one foot in
that maze we shall both roll down a precipice where I shall perish--but
with your name upon my lips, your heart in my heart. Why hold me so high
in that heart and yet so low in reality? What! you who give credit to so
many as to money, can you not give me the charity of faith? And on the
first occasion in our lives when you might prove to me your boundless
trust, do you cast me from my throne in your heart? Between a madman
and me, it is the madman whom you choose to believe? oh, Jules!" She
stopped, threw back the hair that fell about her brow and neck, and
then, in a heart-rending tone, she added: "I have said too much; one
word should suffice. If your soul and your forehead still keep this
cloud, however light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it."

She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale.

"Oh! I will kill that man," thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in his
arms and carried her to her bed.

"Let us sleep in peace, my angel," he said. "I have forgotten all, I
swear it!"

Clemence fell asleep to the music of those sweet words, softly repeated.
Jules, as he watched her sleeping, said in his heart:--

"She is right; when love is so pure, suspicion blights it. To that young
soul, that tender flower, a blight--yes, a blight means death."

When a cloud comes between two beings filled with affection for each
other and whose lives are in absolute unison, that cloud, though it
may disperse, leaves in those souls a trace of its passage. Either
love gains a stronger life, as the earth after rain, or the shock still
echoes like distant thunder through a cloudless sky. It is impossible
to recover absolutely the former life; love will either increase or
diminish.

At breakfast, Monsieur and Madame Jules showed to each other those
particular attentions in which there is always something of affectation.
There were glances of forced gaiety, which seemed the efforts of persons
endeavoring to deceive themselves. Jules had involuntary doubts, his
wife had positive fears. Still, sure of each other, they had slept.