“I am thinking of my mother,” she answered, in a grave voice. “You will never know, Jules, what I suffer in remembering my mother’s dying farewell, said in a voice sweeter than all music, and in feeling the solemn touch of her icy hand at a moment when you overwhelm me with those assurances of your precious love.” She raised her husband, strained him to her with a nervous force greater than that of men, and kissed his hair, covering it with tears. “Ah! I would be hacked in pieces for you! Tell me that I make you happy; that I am to you the most beautiful of women--a thousand women to you. Oh! you are loved as no other man ever was or will be. I don’t know the meaning of those words ‘duty,’ ‘virtue.’ Jules, I love you for yourself; I am happy in loving you; I shall love you more and more to my dying day. I have pride in my love; I feel it is my destiny to have one sole emotion in my life. What I shall tell you now is dreadful, I know--but I am glad to have no child; I do not wish for any. I feel I am more wife than mother. Well, then, can you fear? Listen to me, my own beloved, promise to forget, not this hour of mingled tenderness and doubt, but the words of that madman. Jules, you _must_. Promise me not to see him, not to go to him. I have a deep conviction that if you set one foot in that maze we shall both roll down a precipice where I shall perish--but with your name upon my lips, your heart in my heart. Why hold me so high in that heart and yet so low in reality? What! you who give credit to so many as to money, can you not give me the charity of faith? And on the first occasion in our lives when you might prove to me your boundless trust, do you cast me from my throne in your heart? Between a madman and me, it is the madman whom you choose to believe? oh, Jules!” She stopped, threw back the hair that fell about her brow and neck, and then, in a heart-rending tone, she added: “I have said too much; one word should suffice. If your soul and your forehead still keep this cloud, however light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it.” She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale. “Oh! I will kill that man,” thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in his arms and carried her to her bed. “Let us sleep in peace, my angel,” he said. “I have forgotten all, I swear it!” Clemence fell asleep to the music of those sweet words, softly repeated. Jules, as he watched her sleeping, said in his heart:-- “She is right; when love is so pure, suspicion blights it. To that young soul, that tender flower, a blight--yes, a blight means death.”