CHAPTER X.

HUSBAND AND WIFE.

THUS lay Edmond many days, alternately watched by the doctor and his assistant, till such time as the malady should promise to take a more regular course, and the duty of attending to her husband could be safely intrusted to the countess.

In one of the adjoining rooms she had established herself. She knew that she was not likely to leave it for many weeks; she made her arrangements accordingly. The door between Edmond's chamber and her own she had softly taken out and replaced by portières with heavy curtains.

All the windows of her apartment she had masked and covered in the same way.

From the dull red flame in the ground-glass globe of a lamp suspended from the ceiling passed the only light that visited that prison, freely chosen by the solitary inmate of it. If the gloom of external objects can add weight to the dejection of a brain already oppressed by anxious thoughts, heavy indeed must have been the young fair forehead on which that weary lamp-light shone in the long monotonous hours of Juliet's faithful vigil.

But here, in those sleepless watchings by the heavy dreadful curtain, which her hand daily ventured nearer to, and little by little timidly withdrew-here, at

last, from fires long hidden, another light, a light more ghastly, more lugubrious, entered into her soul, and lighted up the past, the present, the future, all things, with its cold funereal glare.

In the livid reflex of that hideous revelation sunk and ceased forever the humid splendors of those once soft and spiritual eyes, whose desolate, cold, unswerving regard had so strangely thrilled me when I first beheld them years ago.

The light pure blood, whose innocent pulses once so swiftly moved in every virgin vein of that fair body, a few broken words sufficed to stagnate forever in a heart congealed.

A few broken words-an unconscious utterancean involuntary confession-dropped by frenzy from the lips of a maniac!

But those words unveiled the head of Medusa, and the woman that gazed on the thing they revealed became forthwith a statue.

Such I had seen her. I shall never forget it.

And so, one morning, when Edmond, awaking refreshed from his first peaceful slumber, recovered the consciousness of his own identity-when, still weak, but aware, he was able to take notice of the things around him, and, with a sick man's languid sense of returning life, he lifted looks of grateful recognition to the face of his wife watching beside him, that face was as the face of the Judgment Angel.

"Why didst thou not stretch forth thy hand to Felix ?"

These words were spoken slowly, in a voice almost inaudible, but they were terribly distinct.

She knew all.

And when he heard those words and saw that face, he too knew all.

In the look of deadly inexorable doom which accompanied that searching question, he recognized the reflex of his own soul.

He understood that the traitorous secret, which he had so long immured in his inmost heart, had escaped from a breast no longer guarded, and the voice that now audibly accused him was the voice of his own conscience.

Before him stood his crime.

Not the rash act of man overborne by passion, in which man's will and mind have no part. Slave of Passion he had never been, but slave of the Thinking Power.

Only in the act of his mind was his crime. A demon thought.

CHAPTER XI.

CAUSE AND EFFECT.

IN the evening of the day when Juliet and Felix first revealed their hearts to each other, they paused on their homeward path by the outskirts of the forest. Juliet heard a moan in the underwood.

It was Edmond's.

Felix, too, heard something stir in the bushes.
It was Edmond's footstep.

He had been urged back to the chateau by that inexplicable inquietude which precedes the outbreak of passion, like the fume which rises before the flame leaps forth.

What passed within him then, and all that happened immediately afterward, we know.

Accustomed to coop and mew himself up within the strict inclosure of his own mind for single and mortal combat with the new and boisterous power that was then assailing him, he summoned all his pride in aid of a supreme effort to hide, at least, from every eye the desperate struggle from which he could no longer withdraw his spirit.

We also know that in this, unhappily for himself, he succeeded only too well.

It was with this object that he announced his intended alliance with the Rosenberg heiress. For a moment, perhaps, he seriously entertained that intention.

"Yet another year of struggle," he said to himself, "and I shall have mastered this mad passion which has its roots in the error of a whole life."

But ever before his eyes imprudently played and sported the heedless happy pair to whom was given that Paradise from which he was banished. They were indifferent to, because ignorant of, the intense torture that was devouring his heart. There was none to see how he suffered: no gratitude, no tenderness, no pity, for his unguessed pain.

Not one, of those for whom they were endured, divined or recognized the thousand silent sacrifices which daily he imposed upon himself.

He would have undertaken and overcome yet greater difficulties in order to hide these numberless, nameless abnegations from mistrustful or suspicious eyes. He honestly wished to hide them.

But those from whom he sought to hide them were so lightly, easily cheated; they took so readily for granted the utter absence of all that torment which he was at pains to conceal; they believed him so promptly, so implicitly, that he was exasperated by his own success.

And no ebullition, no escape in word, or look, or act, relieved this intolerable anguish.

From his earliest years he had brought, with mathematic precision, his voice, his manners, even the lines of his face, into a harmony undisturbed by expression.

And this, which had once been natural to him, he was now obliged to continue by imitation as a part to be played. He was constrained to be the actor of his former self.