entirely unrecognizable after he had put on an old gray felt hat with
a broken cock's feather on his head. He girded round his loins a broad
leathern belt, in which he stuck a dagger, which he did not wear
habitually. These miserable garments gave him so terrifying an air and
he approached the bed with so strange a motion that the countess
thought her last hour had come.

"Ah! don't kill us!" she cried, "leave me my child, and I will love
you well."

"You must feel yourself very guilty to offer as the ransom of your
faults the love you owe me."

The count's voice was lugubrious and the bitter words were enforced by
a look which fell like lead upon the countess.

"My God!" she cried sorrowfully, "can innocence be fatal?"

"Your death is not in question," said her master, coming out of a sort
of reverie into which he had fallen. "You are to do exactly, and for
love of me, what I shall now tell you."

He flung upon the bed one of the two masks he had taken from the
chest, and smiled with derision as he saw the gesture of involuntary
fear which the slight shock of the black velvet wrung from his wife.

"You will give me a puny child!" he cried. "Wear that mask on your
face when I return. I'll have no barber-surgeon boast that he has seen
the Comtesse d'Herouville."