Nevertheless, this hilarity, this way of talking and drinking, which seemed to me in the others the mere results of bad company or of bad habits, seemed in Marguerite a necessity of forgetting, a fever, a nervous irritability. At every glass of champagne her cheeks would flush with a feverish colour, and a cough, hardly perceptible at the beginning of supper, became at last so violent that she was obliged to lean her head on the back of her chair and hold her chest in her hands every time that she coughed. I suffered at the thought of the injury to so frail a constitution which must come from daily excesses like this. At length, something which I had feared and foreseen happened. Toward the end of supper Marguerite was seized by a more violent fit of coughing than any she had had while I was there. It seemed as if her chest were being torn in two. The poor girl turned crimson, closed her eyes under the pain, and put her napkin to her lips. It was stained with a drop of blood. She rose and ran into her dressing-room. “What is the matter with Marguerite?” asked Gaston. “She has been laughing too much, and she is spitting blood. Oh, it is nothing; it happens to her every day. She will be back in a minute. Leave her alone. She prefers it.” I could not stay still; and, to the consternation of Prudence and Nanine, who called to me to come back, I followed Marguerite. Chapter X The room to which she had fled was lit only by a single candle. She lay back on a great sofa, her dress undone, holding one hand on her heart, and letting the other hang by her side. On the table was a basin half full of water, and the water was stained with streaks of blood. Very pale, her mouth half open, Marguerite tried to recover breath. Now and again her bosom was raised by a long sigh, which seemed to relieve her a little, and for a few seconds she would seem to be quite comfortable. I went up to her; she made no movement, and I sat down and took the hand which was lying on the sofa. “Ah! it is you,” she said, with a smile. I must have looked greatly agitated, for she added: “Are you unwell, too?” “No, but you: do you still suffer?” “Very little;” and she wiped off with her handkerchief the tears which the coughing had brought to her eyes; “I am used to it now.” “You are killing yourself, madame,” I said to her in a moved voice. “I wish I were a friend, a relation of yours, that I might keep you from doing yourself harm like this.” “Ah! it is really not worth your while to alarm yourself,” she replied in a somewhat bitter tone; “see how much notice the others take of me! They know too well that there is nothing to be done.” Thereupon she got up, and, taking the candle, put it on the mantel-piece and looked at herself in the glass. “How pale I am!” she said, as she fastened her dress and passed her fingers over her loosened hair. “Come, let us go back to supper. Are you coming?” I sat still and did not move.