The Marchioness paced impatiently up and down the room. At length, stopping before the seat on which Louise had fallen, she said abruptly—
‘Will you root out this passion?’
‘I cannot,’ replied the Languedocian through her tears.
‘Then life and it must end together,’ said the Marchioness half interrogatively.
‘It may be so,’ said Louise. But immediately, as if suddenly awakened to a new import in the words, shaking her long hair from her face, she exclaimed—
‘You would not kill me!’
A strange slow smile crept over Marie’s face, which had by this time recovered its usual stony impassiveness, as she said—
‘We are rivals!’
But as Louise’s eyes were fixed on her with a look of wonderment, at that moment a sudden burst of laughter from the room on the opposite side of the landing, in which François and Henri d’Aubray, with their companions, were carousing, arrested the attention of the Marchioness. She walked to the door, unclosed it, and listened. A voice was heard proposing the toast, ‘Success to your debut as a creditor, and a long incarceration to Sainte-Croix!’ Then followed the clink of glasses, and the vivas of the guests as they honoured the pledge.
The Marchioness turned pale, and clenched the handle of the door she held until the blood forsook her fingers; she appeared to forget the presence of Louise, and reclosing the door, when the noise had subsided, she walked to the bureau, and opening the box which we have before described, began, half-mechanically, to arrange the small phials with which it was filled. All was now silence in the chamber, broken only by the measured ticking of the pendule on the chimney-piece. It might have lasted some five minutes, when Françoise Roussel entering the room cautiously by the porte-derobée, whispered to her mistress, who flushed at the tidings and hastily closed the box. Then, opening the door which led to a small room contiguous to the apartment, she said to Louise—