room. She saw her husband sitting, with a pen in his hand, asleep in
his arm-chair. The candles had burned to the sockets. She slowly
advanced and read on an envelope, already sealed, the words, "This is
my will."

She knelt down as if before an open grave and kissed her husband's
hand. He woke instantly.

"Jules, my friend, they grant some days to criminals condemned to
death," she said, looking at him with eyes that blazed with fever and
with love. "Your innocent wife asks only two. Leave me free for two
days, and--wait! After that, I shall die happy--at least, you will
regret me."

"Clemence, I grant them."

Then, as she kissed her husband's hands in the tender transport of her
heart, Jules, under the spell of that cry of innocence, took her in
his arms and kissed her forehead, though ashamed to feel himself still
under subjection to the power of that noble beauty.

On the morrow, after taking a few hours' rest, Jules entered his
wife's room, obeying mechanically his invariable custom of not leaving
the house without a word to her. Clemence was sleeping. A ray of light
passing through a chink in the upper blind of a window fell across the
face of the dejected woman. Already suffering had impaired her
forehead and the freshness of her lips. A lover's eye could not fail
to notice the appearance of dark blotches, and a sickly pallor in
place of the uniform tone of the cheeks and the pure ivory whiteness
of the skin,--two points at which the sentiments of her noble soul