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“It is a happiness to me to give her pleasure,” he returned. “I feel great tenderness for her. She is not like the young girls I have known. Her innocence is of a frank and noble quality, which is better than ignorance. One could not bear that the slightest shadow of sin or pain should fall upon her. The atmosphere surrounding her is so bright with pure happiness and the courage of youth.”

Involuntarily he held out his hand.

“Will you”–he began. His voice fell and broke. “Will you go with me?” he ended.

He saw that she was troubled.

“Now?” she faltered.

“Yes–now.”

There was a peculiar pause,–a moment, as it seemed to him, of breathless silence. This silence she broke by her rising slowly from her seat.

“Yes,” she responded, “I will go. Why should I not?”

It was midnight when they left the Trents’, and Jenny stood upon the threshold, a bright figure in a setting of brightness, and kissed her hand to them as they went down the steps.

“I hope you will be better to-morrow, Arthur,” she said.

He turned quickly to look up at her.

“I?”

“Yes. You look so tired. I might say haggard, if it was polite.”

“It would not be polite,” said Bertha, “so don’t say it. Good-night, Jenny!”

But when they were seated in the carriage she glanced at her husband’s face.

“Are you unwell?” she asked.

He passed his hand quickly across his forehead.

“A little fatigued,” he replied. “It is nothing. To-morrow–to-morrow it will be all over.”

And so silence fell upon them.

As they entered the drawing-room a clock chimed the half hour.

“So late as that!” exclaimed Bertha, and sank into a chair with a faint laugh. “Why, to-day is over,” she said. “It is to-morrow.”

M. Villefort had approached a side table. Upon it lay a peculiar-looking oblong box.

“Ah,” he said, softly, “they have arrived.”

“What are they?” Bertha asked.

He was bending over the box to open it, and did not turn toward her, as he replied:–

“It is a gift for a young friend of mine,–a brace of pistols. He has before him a long journey in the East, and he is young enough to have a fancy for firearms.”

He was still examining the weapons when Bertha crossed the room on her way up-stairs, and she paused an instant to look at them.

“They are very handsome,” she said. “One could almost wear them as ornaments.”

“But they would have too threatening a look,” he answered, lightly.

As he raised his eyes they met hers. She half started backward, moved by a new sense of the haggardness of his face.

“You are ill!” she exclaimed. “You are as colorless as marble.”

“And you, too,” he returned, still with the same tender lightness. “Let us hope that our ‘to-morrow’ will find us both better, and you say it is tomorrow now. Good-night!”

She went away without saying more. Weary as she was, she knew there was no sleep for her, and after dismissing her maid, she threw herself upon the lounge before the bedroom fire and lay there. To-night she felt as if her life had reached its climax. She burst into a passion of tears.

“Jenny! Jenny!” she cried, “how I envy–how I envy you!”

The recollection of Jenny shining in her pretty gala dress, and delighting in her birthday presents, and everybody else’s pride and affection, filled her with a morbid misery and terror. She covered her face with her hands as she thought of it.

“Once,” she panted, “as I looked at her tonight, for a moment I almost hated her. Am I so bad as that?–am I?”

Scarcely two seconds afterward she had sprung to her feet and was standing by the side of her couch, her heart beating with a rapid throb of fright, her limbs trembling. A strange sound had fallen suddenly upon the perfect silence of the night–a sound loud, hard, and sharp–the report of a pistol! What dread seized her she knew not. She was across the room and had wrenched the door open in an instant, then with flying feet down the corridor and the staircase. But half-way down the stairs she began to cry out aloud, “Arthur! Arthur!” not conscious of her own voice–“Arthur, what is it?” The door of the drawing-room flew open before the fierce stroke of her palm.