Page:The Story of Manon Lescaut and of the Chevalier des Grieux.pdf/160

164 to Paris the next day and endeavor to find some remedy for this most vexatious kind of ailment.

At supper I observed that Manon looked pale and thin. This had escaped my notice at the Hôpital, as the room in which I saw her was very dimly lighted. I asked her whether the whiteness of her cheeks was not a lingering result of the horror she had felt on seeing her brother murdered before her very eyes. She assured me that, deeply shocked as she had been by that awful event, her paleness was simply the effect of having undergone three months' separation from me.

"You love me very dearly, then?" I asked.

"A thousand times more dearly than I can express," she responded.

"And you will never again desert me?"

"Never, while I live!" was her reply; and she confirmed this assurance by so many caresses and vows of constancy that it seemed indeed impossible that she could ever forget them.

I have always been convinced that she was sincere: what motive could she have had for carrying duplicity to such a length as this? But sincere though she was, she was still more fickle, nay, it became impossible to say what