The smooth, reassuring tones brought back the Italian’s scattered senses, and the light of reason to her brilliant, distended eyes. She turned her glance on the young girl standing by, and sank back, shuddering, gasping for breath, almost on the verge of hysterics. “I believe--I--was dreaming. Oh, Heaven! what a horrid, awful dream!” She covered her face with her hands, with a sobbing breath. “I am scarcely awake now. I feel so--so tired.” “Your journey has fatigued you, madam. Why, you have had only a few hours’ rest, though you slept a little in the train. Come, I suppose madam must make an exertion, and rise. I will order the coffee.” “Why do you wish me to get up? Oh! my head aches so fearfully--at the back, Finette.” “Madam forgets it is her wedding-day. I am sorry madam’s head is so bad,” said Finette. “_Bon Dieu!_ my wedding-day!” cried Lucia, again starting up. “I had forgotten. Give me my wrapper.” Finette gave her the richly embroidered silken wrapper, and then went out to give directions about madam’s coffee. Lucia threw on her wrapper, and got out of bed. A few tottering steps, and she fell back, flinging her arms on the coverlet in blank despair. “I believe I am going to be ill,” she cried, aloud. “But I must not be ill until I have been made a princess. Oh! this sickening pain in my head. But I must not give way at the last, after daring so much. What folly! It is simply fatigue. I ought not to have stayed there till the last moment, and then taken such a hurried flight.” She lay in a half-stupefied state, however, making no effort to raise herself, as if she felt it would be useless. Then hot, blinding tears of rage and despair began to rain over her arms, on which she rested. So absorbed was the unhappy creature by her terrors and doubts, her feeling of physical exhaustion, her dread lest her forces should fail her at the last, that she did not notice the return of Finette. The girl stood on the snow-white, fleecy rug just inside the door, in an attitude and with an expression which showed that she was utterly confounded by the scene before her. Madam had been in all varieties of humors--in violent, stormy frenzies of rage, sullen, depressed, ill-humored, exhausted, wearied--but never before like this. Finette’s idea was natural, and yet, hitherto, undreamed of, for her lady had seemed, if not the least in love with her handsome prince, certainly pleased and eager to welcome him. “She does not like him,” thought the waiting-maid, “and is only going to marry him for his money and his title; perhaps she likes somebody else. But it will never do for her to go on in this way.” The girl was pleased at the prospective vision of being confidential maid to a rich princess--the position would offer so many advantages in addition to the increase of social dignity. It ill-suited her that the marriage should be put off, and she was superstitious enough to regard as most unlucky a postponement of the wedding-day.