Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and loving support, needed by him less and less--even at last, as he developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected--a sense of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet, the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter desolation. One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a sunless corner. “Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is dead.” “Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome, might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn breaths. Her baby--theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her, coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer. “Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.” And she walked haughtily away, scornful of the storm she knew her reproof would evoke in that hysteric bosom; careless of how her words might rankle and give forth poisonous humours. But that night she dreamed that she awoke and saw her lover stand beside her; and his face to her ghast eyes appeared all thinly laced with blood; and in his hand he held a shrunk and withered plant. “Dead!” he moaned: “O, faithless and untrue, look here! Dead, dead!” And so wailing, while she strove madly for speech, he passed and faded, seeming to melt away into the darkness; and, struggling, she awoke in truth, her cheeks all wet with tears, and held out wild entreating arms. “No!” she whispered: “Beloved--no, no! Not to take it with you--not to kill me like that! I will be true; I will never sin to it or you again.” And so she lay sobbing, a great fear and rapture at her heart.