The hard tones left her voice in the last phrase. A shadow of the love she persuaded herself she felt for Henri sprang up, and choked her anger. She forgot Jeanne-Marie for the moment, and saw only the little figure tossing with fever and delirium, and pity for her own sorrow filled her eyes with tears. She was surprised at the calm cruelty of her own words. Looking up curiously to see how her sister would take it, she started, for Jeanne-Marie’s face seemed suddenly to have grown old and grey. She was struggling breathlessly to speak, and when her voice came, it sounded far off, and weak like the voice of a sick child: “You know well that in your anger you have lied to me. Henri may be ill--and dying; it is not I who have made him so. You shall listen to me now, though I will not keep you here long; for the hand that struck my mother suddenly through the heart, struck me while you were speaking. You have kept me all these days in suspense, and now you have given the blow. Be satisfied, Suzanne.” She paused, and the sound of her heavy breathing struck Suzanne’s frightened senses like the knell of a doom. “Listen to me. Henri came to me of his own will, and never did I persuade him or suggest to him to come. Never did he go home later than four o’clock; there was nothing done in secret; neither I, nor any in the village, thought it a crime he came to visit me. Often I have seen him keeping the geese in the long grass of the meadows at six, at seven o’clock. Seek the fever there--not on the village road before the sunset. As the good God hears me, never have I stood between that boy and his mother. Gradually you took from me every privilege my affection knew; but I said nothing. Ah, I loved him dearly; I was content to wait. But all that is over. If God grants me life--but He is good, and I think He knows my suffering all these years--I swear before Him your house shall be to me a house of strangers, Henri the child of strangers, and my brother’s face unknown to me. Never shall my father’s daughter hear again what I have heard from you to-day. All these years you have played upon my heart. You have watched the suffering; you have known how each word seemed so innocent, but stabbed so deep. You have seen your child wind himself round my heart, and every day, every hour, you have struggled to pluck him from me. Now, I tell you I tear your children from my heart; you have killed not only my body, but my love. Go, and leave me for ever, or by my father, I will curse you where you stand.” She tottered forward, and with one horrified look at the agony of her menacing face, Suzanne turned and ran. And Jeanne-Marie fell all her length on the garden soil. VI