After having slept two hours, almost peacefully, he awoke toward midnight. He was a little feverish; the spots at the points of his cheek-bones were a little redder. Seeing me sitting at the head of his bed, my cheeks damp with tears, he said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach: "What, weeping again? You wish, then, to make me sad, and to give me pain? Why do you not lie down? Come and lie down beside me." I cried, shaken by sobs: "Ah! Monsieur Georges, do you wish me, then, to kill you? Do you wish me to suffer all my life from remorse at having killed you?" All my life! I had already forgotten that I wanted to die with him, to die of him, to die as he died. "Monsieur Georges! Monsieur Georges! Have pity on me, I implore you!" But his lips were on my lips. Death was on my lips. "Be still!" he exclaimed, gasping. "I have never loved you so much as to-night." Suddenly his arms relaxed and fell back, inert, upon the bed; his lips abandoned mine. And from his mouth, turned upward, there came a cry of distress, and then a flow of hot blood that spattered my face. With a bound I was out of bed. A mirror opposite revealed my image, red and bloody. I was mad, and, running about the room in bewilderment, it was my impulse to call for aid. But the instinct of self-preservation, the fear of responsibilities, of the revelation of my crime, and I know not what else that was cowardly and calculating, closed my mouth, and held me back at the edge of the abyss over which my reason was tottering. Very clearly and very speedily I realized that it would not do for any one to enter the room in its present condition. O human misery! There was something more spontaneous than my grief, more powerful than my fear; it was my ignoble prudence and my base calculations. In my terror I had the presence of mind to open the door of the _salon_, and then the door of the ante-room, and listen. Not a sound. Everybody in the house was asleep. Then I returned to the bedside. I raised Georges's body, as light as a feather, in my arms. I lifted up his head, maintaining it in an upright position in my hands. The blood continued to flow from his mouth in pitchy filaments; I heard his chest discharging itself through his throat, with the sound of an emptying bottle. His eyes, turned up, showed nothing but their reddish globes between the swollen eyelids. "Georges! Georges! Georges!" Georges did not answer these calls and cries. He did not hear them. He heard nothing more of the cries and calls of earth. "Georges! Georges! Georges!" I let go his body; his body sank upon the bed. I let go his head; his head fell back heavily upon the pillow. I placed my hand upon his heart; his heart had ceased to beat. "Georges! Georges! Georges!" The horror of this silence, of these mute lips, of this corpse red and motionless, and of myself, was too much for me. And, crushed with grief, crushed with the frightful necessity of restraining my grief, I fell to the floor in a swoon.