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24 explanation. One could have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of the floor, or perhaps the shadow of a leaf projected from outside across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by lurid exaggerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her caresses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communicated to me the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.

Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed.

"My God! My God!" she moaned, "that's the end of it. . . . My poor little Jean! . . . You, too, they will take away from me! . . . Oh, God, have pity on him! . . . Could that be possible! . . . So little, so weak! . . ."

And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the ground, trying to quiet her:

"My good Marie," she stammered, "listen to me. Promise me, yes promise me to do as I tell you. . . . You have seen it just now, you have seen it, haven't you? . . . Well, take Jean, and bring him up because I—you see . . . he must not. . . . I'll kill him. . . . Here, you'll stay in this room with him, right near me. . . . You shall take good care of him and tell me all about him. . . . I'll feel his presence there, I'll hear him. . . . But you understand, he must not see me. . . . It is I who make him that way! . . ."

Marie held me in her arms.