"What are your plans? Shall you go to Provence into the sunshine?" "No, spring is there. As soon as the warm weather comes, we shall go to Saint Martin d'Uriage." "That is the mountains, and you may find it cold there again. You take very poor care of yourself." She tried to make a slight motion of indifference, but her arm was too weak. As if the future no longer interested her, she explained, with that smile of conscious invalids, which permits them to mitigate the strictness of their doctors' orders: "I shall soon be better, you will see. My health is good. In any case I have made my will." "It is absurd! Why these gloomy thoughts?" "I confide my children to the care of my mother. You understand I do not wish that woman--You will help mamma to put all obstacles aside, will you not?" "Oh, Madame--" "Will you promise me? Albert is your friend. He will listen to you." Philippe rose, adding the melancholy of his hopeless love to his pity, and no longer able to master his emotion: "No, no, Madame. That will not be." The next day, using the end of his legal Easter holiday, he took the train to Paris, without letting anyone know of his journey. This absence, which would scarcely be remarked, lasted for several days. At Grenoble nobody suspected it. The lawyer had never been very confidential, and his goings and comings helped to preserve the mystery. As soon as he came back he went to the Rue Haxo. Elizabeth, with languor and an unsteady step, was slowly taking up her routine again. At the end of his visit, which was very short, he put this question to her: "If they separated, what would you do?" She evaded giving an answer. "I do not know," she said. "If he were free--if he came back to you." She fixed him with her eyes, enlarged by illness, and lit up with a somber flame: "I no longer believe that possible." Scarcely had she said these words, than she felt as if she had refused an offer from Albert. In despair, she recalled the promise that she had sworn at Mme. Derize's death bed. She had said she would forgive, forgive without restriction. And now that she was recovering she had said "Too late," which is the excuse of the weak. When Philippe had gone, she reproached herself, but she was so weak. Had she not suffered too much, waited too long? Had she not been sufficiently humiliated by life? When a person had begun to enter on the path of abnegation and sacrifice, did he never stop, must he build an everlasting Calvary? To escape, to come back, to attempt to find personal happiness elsewhere, that she could not do; but, like an overladen beast, who resists an ascent, she felt neither the strength, nor the courage to go on. She did not know that one walks much longer when overtired, than before becoming fatigued. It is always at the end that an ascent demands the greatest effort.