It would have been all very well without the icy cold that assailed my legs, and I saw nothing in reach to cover me. I said to myself, “Captain, the position is not tenable,” when at length I perceived on the couch--One sometimes is childishly ashamed, but I really dared not, and I waited for a long minute struggling between a sense of the ridiculous and the cold which I felt was increasing. At last, when I heard my wife’s breathing become more regular and thought that she must be asleep, I stretched out my arm and pulled toward me her wedding-gown which was on the couch--the silk rustled enough to wake the dead--and with the energy which one always finds on an emergency, wrapped it round me savagely like a railway rug. Then yielding to an involuntary fit of sybaritism, I unhooked the bellows and tried to get the fire to burn. “After all,” I said to myself, arranging the blackened embers and working the little instrument with a thousand precautions, “after all, I have behaved like a gentleman. If the General saw me at this moment he would laugh in my face; but no matter, I have acted rightly.” Had I not sworn to be sincere, I do not know whether I should acknowledge to you that I suddenly felt horrible tinglings in the nasal regions. I wished to restrain myself, but the laws of nature are those which one can not escape. My respiration suddenly ceased, I felt a superhuman power contract my facial muscles, my nostrils dilated, my eyes closed, and all at once I sneezed with such violence that the bottle of Eau des Carmes shook again. God forgive me! A little cry came from the bed, and immediately afterward the most silvery frank and ringing outbreak of laughter followed. Then she added in her simple, sweet, musical tones: “Have you hurt yourself--, Georges?” She had said Georges after a brief silence, and in so low a voice that I scarcely heard it. “I am very ridiculous, am I not, dear? and you are quite right to laugh at me. What would you have? I am camping out and I am undergoing the consequences.” “You are not ridiculous, but you are catching cold,” and she began to laugh again. “Naughty girl!” “Cruel one, you ought to say, and you would not be wrong if I were to let you fall ill.” She said this with charming grace. There was a mingling of timidity and tenderness, modesty and raillery, which I find it impossible to express, but which stupefied me. She smiled at me, then I saw her move nearer to the wall in order to leave room for me, and, as I hesitated to cross the room. “Come, forgive me,” she said. I approached the bed; my teeth were chattering. “How kind you are to me, dear,” she said to me after a moment or so; “will you wish me good-night?” and she held out her cheek to me. I approached nearer, but as the candle had just gone out I made a mistake as to the spot, and my lips brushed hers. She quivered, then, after a brief silence, she murmured in a low tone, “You must forgive me; you frightened me so just now.”