Charlotte's Inheritance. M. E. Braddon

her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the world there was no creature more utterly apart from him than she, whether she lived in the same house with him or was distant as the Antipodes. What did it matter, then, since she was destined to disappear from his life, whether she vanished to-day or a year hence? He argued with himself that it could be a question of no moment to him. There was a death-blow that must descend upon him, cruel, inevitable. Let it come when it would.

      Every day when he came home to dinner, M. Lenoble expected to behold a vacant place by the side of his hostess; every day he was pleasantly disappointed. The pale hopeless face was still to be seen, ghost-like, at that noisy board. The face was more pale, more hopeless, as it seemed to Gustave, every day he looked upon it.

      He asked Madame Magnotte when the English lady was going to leave, but she could not tell.

      "She talks of leaving from day to day," said madame; "it will no doubt be soon. I am sorry to lose her. She is very gentle, and gives no trouble to any one. But she is sad—ah, how sad she is! She has suffered, monsieur."

      Gustave agreed to this. Yes, she had suffered; but what, and how?

      He watched her closely, but she was always the same. She no longer spent her evenings in the salon, but in her own apartment. He saw her only at dinner-time, and had no opportunity of speaking to her.

      At last the day came upon which he missed her at the usual hour. He sat through the tedious meal without speaking; eating a little, drinking a little, mechanically, but with no consciousness of what he ate or drank. There was a mist before his eyes, a confusion of voices in his ears; but the faculties of sight and hearing seemed suspended. The agony he suffered during that miserable hour was bitter as death.

      "O, my God, how I love her!" he said to himself, while Raoul's bass roar brayed in his ear on one side, and Leon's shrill squeal tortured him on the other.

      He made his way to Madame Magnotte directly after dinner.

      "She is gone?" he exclaimed.

      "But who, my friend? Ah, yes; it is of that poor Madame Meynell you speak. How you are interested in her! No, she is not gone, poor woman. She remains always. She has the air of a person who knows not her own mind. Yet I am sure she thinks of going. To-day, for the first time, she has been writing letters. Reine came to tell me she had seen her occupied in her own room for the first time. It is not her habit to occupy herself."

      Gustave's heart gave a great jump. She was not gone; he might see her again—if it were but a glimpse of her pale face looking out of the diligence as it drove out of the Cour de Messageries. One look, one glance; it would be something to carry in his heart all his life. All his life! He looked forward and shuddered. What a dreary life it must needs be! Côtenoir, Beaubocage, Madelon, the law; to plead, to read papers, to study dry as dust books. He shrank appalled from the contemplation of that dreary desert of existence—a life without her.

      She had been writing letters—doubtless letters to her friends to announce her return. Her departure must be very near at hand.

      Gustave refused to go out that evening. His fellow-students were bent on a night's pleasure at a dancing-garden then in vogue, where there would be twinkling lamps and merry music under the May moon. The lamp-lit parterres, the joyous waltzes, had no attractions for Gustave Lenoble. He haunted the dull salon, dim and dreary in the twilight; for Madame Magnotte was chary of lamps and candles, and prolonged to its utmost limits the pensive interval between day and night. He walked softly up and down the room, unheeded by the ladies clustered in a group by one of the windows. Restless and unhappy, he could neither go nor stay. She was not coming down to the salon this evening. He had clung to the faint hope that she might appear; but the faint hope died away in his breast as the night deepened. What purpose could be served by his remaining in that dismal room? He was no nearer her than he would have been in the remotest wilds of Central America. He would go out—not to the odious dancing-garden, but to the cool dark streets, where the night wind might blow this fever from his brain.

      He left the room suddenly, and hurried downstairs. At the bottom of the staircase he almost stumbled against a woman, who turned and looked at him in the light of a little oil-lamp that hung over the door of the portress's lodge.

      It was the Englishwoman, deadly pale, and with a wild look in her face that Gustave had never seen there before. She gave him no sign of recognition, but passed out of the courtyard, and walked rapidly away. That unusual look in her face, the strangeness of the fact that she should be leaving the house at this hour, inspired him with a vague terror, and he followed her, not stealthily, without a thought that he was doing any wrong by such an act—rather, indeed, with the conviction that he had a right so to follow her.

      She walked very quickly—at a more rapid pace than Gustave would have supposed possible for so fragile a creature. She chose the lonelier streets, and Gustave had no difficulty in following her; she never looked back, but went straight on her course, without pause or slackening of her pace, as if with a settled purpose.

      "Where can she be going?" Gustave asked himself; and an answer, vague, hideous, terrible, suggested itself to his mind. The idea that occurred to him was one that would scarcely have occurred to an Englishman under the same circumstances, but to a Frenchman it was a very familiar idea.

      It was dark now—the darkness that reigns between early sunset and late moonrise. As the lonely woman went farther along the dreary streets parallel with the quay, the dreadful suspicion grew stronger in Gustave's mind. From that instant he had but one thought; in that moment he put away from him for ever all sense of obligation to Madelon Frehlter; he shook off father, mother, sister, old associations, home ties, ambition, fortune—he lived alone for this woman, and the purpose of his life was to save her from despair and death.

      They emerged upon the quay at last. The long stretch of pavement was deserted. Ah, now she looked back—she looked on every side with wild unseeing eyes—and now there could be little doubt as to the purpose that brought her here. She crossed the road, and went upon the bridge, Gustave following close; in the next minute she was standing on the stone bench, a tremulous, fluttering figure, with arms stretched towards the water; in a breath she was clasped to Gustave's breast, clasped by arms that meant to hold her for ever.

      The shock of that surprise utterly unnerved the wretched creature. She shivered violently, and struggled to free herself from those strong arms.

      "Let me go!" she cried in English. "Let me go!" And then, finding herself powerless, she turned and looked at her captor. "M. Lenoble! O, why do you persecute me? Why do you follow me?"

      "Because I want to save you."

      "To save me! To snatch me back when I was going to find rest—an end for my weary life! O yes, I know that it is a sinful end; but my life has been all sin."

      "Your life all sin! Foolish one, I will never believe that."

      "It is true," she cried, with passionate self-reproach. "The sin of selfishness, and pride, and disobedience. There is no fate too hard for me—but, O, my fate is very hard! Why did you keep me from that river? You do not know how miserable my life is—you do not know. I paid my last penny to Madame Magnotte this morning. I have no money to take me back to England, even if I dared go there—and I dare not. I have prayed for courage, for strength to go back, but my prayers have not been heard; and there is nothing for me but to die. What would be the sin of my throwing myself into that river! I must die; I shall die of starvation in the streets."

      "No, no," cried Gustave passionately; "do you think I have dragged you back from death to give you to loneliness and despair? My dear one, you are mine—mine by right of this night. These arms that have kept you from death shall shelter you—ah, let them shelter you! These hands shall work for you. My love, my love! you cannot tell how dear you are to me. If there must be want or trouble for either of us, it shall come to me first."

      He had placed her on the stone bench, bewildered and unresisting, and had seated himself by her side. The fragile figure, shivering still, even in the