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.

M. Villefort stood where she had left him; but while his left hand supported his weight against the table, his right was thrust into his breast. One of the pistols lay at his feet.

She thought it was Death's self that confronted her in his face, but he spoke to her, trying faintly to smile.

"Do not come in," he said, "I have met with—an accident. It is nothing. Do not come in. A servant——"

His last recollection was of her white face and white draperies as he fell, and somehow, dizzy, sick, and faint as he was, he seemed to hear her calling out, in a voice strangely like Jenny's, "Arthur! Arthur!"

In less than half an hour the whole house was astir. Upstairs physicians were with the wounded man, downstairs Mrs. Trent talked and wept over her daughter, after the manner of all good women. She was fairly terrified by Bertha's strange shudderings, quick, strained breath, and dilated eyes. She felt as if she could not reach her—as if she hardly made herself heard.

"You must calm yourself, Bertha," she would say. "Try to calm yourself. We must hope for the best. Oh, how could it have happened!"

It was in the midst of this that a servant entered with a letter, which he handed to his mistress. The envelope bore upon it nothing but her own name.

She looked at it with a bewildered expression.

"For me?" she said.

"It fell from Monsieur's pocket as we carried him upstairs," replied the man.

"Don't mind it now, Bertha," said her mother, "Ah, poor M. Villefort!"

But Bertha had opened it mechanically and was reading it

At first it seemed as if it must have been written in a language she did not understand; but after the first few sentences a change appeared. Her breath came and went more quickly than before—a kind of horror grew in her eyes. At the last she uttered a low, struggling cry. The paper was crushed in her hand, she cast one glance around the room as if in bewildering search for refuge, and flung herself upon her mother's breast.

"Save me, mother!" she said. "Help me! If he dies now, I shall go mad!"

Afterward, in telling her story at home, good Mrs. Trent almost broke down.

"Oh, Jenny!" she said. "Just to think of the poor fellow's having had it in his pocket then! Of course I did not see it, but one can fancy that it was something kind and tender,—perhaps some little surprise he had planned for her. It seemed as if she could not bear it."

M. Villefort's accident was the subject of discussion for many days. He had purchased a wonderful pair of pistols as a gift for a young friend. How it had happened that one had been loaded none knew; it was just possible that he had been seized with the whim to load it himself—at all events, it had gone off in his hands. An inch—nay, half an inch—to the right, and Madame Villefort, who flew downstairs at the sound of the report, would only have found a dead man at her feet.

"Ma foi!" said M. Renard, repressing his smile; "this is difficult for Monsieur, but it may leave 'la petite Dame' at liberty."

Madame de Castro flew at him with flashing eyes.

"Silence!" she said, "if you would not have me strike you with my cane." And she looked as if she were capable of doing it.

Upon his sick-bed M, Villefort was continually haunted by an apparition—an apparition of a white face and white draperies, such as he had seen as he fell. Sometimes it was here, sometimes there, sometimes near him, and sometimes indistinct and far away. Sometimes he called out to it and tried to extend his arms; again he lay and watched, it murmuring gentle words, and smiling mournfully.

Mrs. Trent and the doctor were in despair. Madame Villefort obstinately refused to be forced from her husband's room. There were times when they