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“Do you know,” said Mrs. Trent to her husband, “I have found out that she always carries that letter in her breast? I see her put her hand to it in the strangest way a dozen times a day.”

One night, awakening from a long sleep to a clearer mental consciousness than usual, M. Villefort found his apparition standing over him.

She stood with one hand clinched upon her breast, and she spoke to him.

“Arthur!” she said,–“Arthur, do you know me?”

He answered her, “Yes.”

She slipped down upon her knees, and held up in her hand a letter crushed and broken.

“Try to keep your mind clear while you listen to me,” she implored. “Try–try! I must tell you, or I shall die. I am not the bad woman you think me. I never had read it–I had not seen it. I think he must have been mad. Once I loved him, but he killed my love himself. I could not have been bad like that, Jenny!–mother!–Arthur! believe me! believe me!”

In this supreme moment of her anguish and shame she forgot all else. She stretched forth her hands, panting.

“Believe me! It is true! Try to understand! Some one is coming! Say one word before it is too late!”

“I understand,” he whispered, “and I believe.” He made a weak effort to touch her hand, but failed. He thought that perhaps it was the chill and numbness of death which stole over him and held him bound. When the nurse, whose footsteps they had heard, entered, she found him lying with glazed eyes, and Madame Villefort fallen in a swoon at the bedside.

And yet, from this time forward the outside world began to hear that his case was not so hopeless after all.

“Villefort will possibly recover,” it was said at first; then, “Villefort improves, it seems;” and, at last, “Villefort is out of danger Who would have thought it?”

Nobody, however, could say that Madame had kept pace with her husband. When Monsieur was sufficiently strong to travel, and was advised to do so, there were grave doubts as to the propriety of his wife’s accompanying him.

But she would not listen to those doubts.

“I will not stay in Paris,” she said to her mother. “I want to be free from it, and Jenny has promised to go with us.”

They were to go into Normandy, and the day before their departure Ralph Edmondstone came to bid them good-bye.

Of the three he was by far the most haggard figure, and when Bertha came down to meet him in the empty drawing-room, he became a wretched figure with a broken, hopeless air, For a few seconds Bertha did not speak, but stood a pace or two away looking at him. It seemed, in truth, as she waited there in her dark, nun-like dress, that nearly all her beauty had left her. There remained only her large sad eyes and pretty hair, and the touching look of extreme youth. In her hand she held the crushed letter.

“See!” she said at last, holding this out to him. “I am not so bad–so bad as that.”

He caught it from her hand and tore it into fragments. He was stabbed through and through with shame and remorse. After all, his love had been strong enough here, and his comprehension keen enough to have made him repent in the dust of the earth, in his first calm hour, the insult he had put upon her.

“Forgive me!” he cried; “oh, forgive me!”

The few steps between them might have been a myriad of miles.

“I did love you–long ago,” she said; “but you never thought of me. You did not understand me then–nor afterward. All this winter my love has been dying a hard death. You tried to keep it alive, but–you did not understand. You only humiliated and tortured me–And I knew that if I had loved you more, you would have loved me less. See!” holding up her thin hand, “I have been worn out in the struggle between my unhappiness and remorse and you.”