"It is too late, Louise; you love, you are happy in your affection; I read your happiness through your tears—behind the tears which the loyalty of your nature makes you shed; I feel the sighs which your affection breathes forth. Louise, Louise, you have made me the most abjectly wretched man living; leave me, I entreat you. Adieu! Adieu!"
"Forgive me! oh, forgive me, Raoul, for what I have done."
"Have I not done more? Have I not told you that I loved you still?" She buried her face in her hands.
"And to tell you that—do you hear me, Louise?—to tell you that, at such a moment as this, to tell you that, as I have told you, is to pronounce my own sentence of death. Adieu!" La Valliere wished to hold out her hands to him.
"We ought not to see each other again in this world," he said; and as she was on the point of calling out in bitter agony at this remark, he placed his hand on her mouth to stifle the exclamation. She pressed her lips upon it and fell fainting to the ground. "Olivain," said Raoul, "take this young lady and bear her to the carriage which is waiting for her at the door." As Olivain lifted her up, Raoul made a movement as if to dart toward La Valliere, in order to give her a first and last kiss, but, stopping abruptly, he said, "No! she is not mine. I am not a thief, like the king of France." And he returned to his room, while the lackey carried La Valliere, still fainting, to the carriage.
CHAPTER LXIX.
WHAT RAOUL HAD GUESSED.
As soon as Raoul had quitted Athos and D'Artagnan, and as soon as the two exclamations which had followed his departure had escaped their lips, they found themselves face to face alone. Athos immediately resumed the earnest air that he had assumed at D'Artagnan's arrival.
"Well," he said, "what have you come to announce to me, my friend?"