Who could detect the change more keenly than
I? I, who had feasted upon every line and curve that constituted her
physical perfection, whose memory had been fed upon the recollection
of their rare loveliness, and whose hope had lived upon this
expectation of seeing her soon again.
When I arrived she was sleeping, the still quiet sleep of an infant,
her breast scarcely heaving as the feeble breath came and went. Her
mother was standing by the open doorway in an adjoining room looking
in upon the peaceful invalid with tearful eyes. She advanced on
tip-toe to meet me, and twining her arms around me led me away down a
dimly-lit corridor into a cosy sitting-room at the end, where a
cheerful gas-light greeted us. Our noiseless entrance disturbed the
solitary occupant, who, as we crossed the threshold, rose up abruptly
from where he sat by a small table near the window, and gathering up
the books which he had been reading, strode eagerly towards a
curtained doorway opposite, and vanished behind the waving drapery,
just as we passed into the room.
There was an uneasy look in Madame de Beaumont's eyes for a second or
two as they followed the receding figure. Then with an affectation of
ordinary solicitude she turned and said to me,
"I did not know that anyone was here. We disturbed Bayard at his
studies I am afraid."
"Let us go somewhere else," I suggested a little eagerly.
"Oh," she answered, shaking her head significantly, "that would not
bring him back I assure you, we may as well be comfortable here as
elsewhere, now.
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