"Ah! I would be hacked in pieces for you! Tell me that I make you
happy; that I am to you the most beautiful of women--a thousand women
to you. Oh! you are loved as no other man ever was or will be. I don't
know the meaning of those words 'duty,' 'virtue.' Jules, I love you
for yourself; I am happy in loving you; I shall love you more and more
to my dying day. I have pride in my love; I feel it is my destiny to
have one sole emotion in my life. What I shall tell you now is
dreadful, I know--but I am glad to have no child; I do not wish for
any. I feel I am more wife than mother. Well, then, can you fear?
Listen to me, my own beloved, promise to forget, not this hour of
mingled tenderness and doubt, but the words of that madman. Jules, you
_must_. Promise me not to see him, not to go to him. I have a deep
conviction that if you set one foot in that maze we shall both roll
down a precipice where I shall perish--but with your name upon my
lips, your heart in my heart. Why hold me so high in that heart and
yet so low in reality? What! you who give credit to so many as to
money, can you not give me the charity of faith? And on the first
occasion in our lives when you might prove to me your boundless trust,
do you cast me from my throne in your heart? Between a madman and me,
it is the madman whom you choose to believe? oh, Jules!" She stopped,
threw back the hair that fell about her brow and neck, and then, in a
heart-rending tone, she added: "I have said too much; one word should
suffice. If your soul and your forehead still keep this cloud, however
light it be, I tell you now that I shall die of it."

She could not repress a shudder, and turned pale.

"Oh! I will kill that man," thought Jules, as he lifted his wife in
his arms and carried her to her bed.