Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/266

 But it could not be, Jeanne-Marie. Your good God, you love so well, would not have it and so;"—there came a sob in her voice that she choked down, and Jeanne-Marie's face went a shade greyer as she listened—"it happened that I was long at the market last week, and you, knowing this would be so, because it was a big market, brought him home late, when the fever was springing from the marshes—it was Marguerite Vallée saw him and came and told me—and now these four days he has lain with fever, and the officier de santé tells us there grows something in his throat that may kill him in four days."

The hard tones left her voice in the last phrase. A shadow of the love she persuaded herself she felt for Henri sprang up, and choked her anger. She forgot Jeanne-Marie for the moment, and saw only the little figure tossing with fever and delirium, and pity for her own sorrow filled her eyes with tears. She was surprised at the calm cruelty of her own words. Looking up curiously to see how her sister would take it, she started, for Jeanne-Marie's face seemed suddenly to have grown old and grey. She was struggling breathlessly to speak, and when her voice came, it sounded far off, and weak like the voice of a sick child:

"You know well that in your anger you have lied to me. Henri may be ill—and dying; it is not I who have made him so. You shall listen to me now, though I will not keep you here long; for the hand that struck my mother suddenly through the heart, struck me while you were speaking. You have kept me all these days in suspense, and now you have given the blow. Be satisfied, Suzanne."

She paused, and the sound of her heavy breathing struck Suzanne's frightened senses like the knell of a doom.

"Listen to me. Henri came to me of his own will, and never did I persuade him or suggest to him to come. Never