But presently the quiet sleep came to an end. Lucienne tossed from side to side, and began to break out into the most pitiful sobbing. Madame Gaumont rose and went over to the bed again. The girl lay with her head deep in the pillows, crying with the unrestrained abandonment of a child, and at intervals whispering a name which the good lady could not catch. For a moment or two the latter stood irresolute, and then began to shake the weeper by the shoulder. “There, there, my pretty one,” she said, “you’ve had a bad dream. You must not cry like that, or we shall never be able to let you see Monsieur le Marquis to-morrow.” This statement was not without its effect. Lucienne instantly sat up. “I don’t want to see him,” she wailed. “You must tell him I'm ill—tell him anything—only do not let him come near me. . . . But find out from him about Louis. I must know—I shall go mad if I don’t! You will find out . . . promise me!” “Yes, yes, love, I promise you; only lie down now and try to keep quiet,” responded Madame Gaumont, whose mind had just come to several sudden conclusions. She busied herself round the bed, shaking the pillow and smoothing the tumbled bedclothes, and Lucienne lay back and watched her, and seemed content to listen to her prattle. And before long she slept again, and slept quietly, till she woke with a start to find the room full of summer sunlight, and her kind watcher gone. Almost with the first movement of consciousness her mind made that painful mental effort to reproduce in the morning the vague something which has happened before the period of oblivion. First there came faint images of the night—of Madame Gaumont and a shaded lamp, of restless tossings and bad dreams, and then suddenly a mental picture which eclipsed all others, and a familiar voice sounding in her ears—“I had not meant to tell you, but perhaps you had better know.”