“I—I don't like to tell!”
“But if I insist on being told? Come, Gretchen, I must know what Colonel Bernhard said.”
“He said it was wrong to stay in like this week after week, and month after month. He—he said you were killing yourself by inches, Monsieur Maurice.”
Monsieur Maurice laughed a short bitter laugh.
“Killing myself!” he repeated. “Well, I hope not; for weary as I am of it, I would sooner go on bearing the burden of life than do my enemies the favour of dying out of their way.”
The words, the look, the accent made me tremble. I never forgot them.
How could I forget that Monsieur Maurice had enemies—enemies who longed for his death?
So the first blush of early Spring went by; and the crocuses lived their little life and passed away, and the primroses came in their turn, yellowing every shady nook in the scented woods; and the larches put on their crimson tassels, and the laburnum its mantle of golden fringe, and the almond-tree burst into a leafless bloom of pink—and still Monsieur Maurice, adhering to his resolve, refused to stir one step beyond the threshold of his rooms.
Sad and monotonous now to the last degree, his life dragged heavily on. He wrote no more. He read, or seemed to read, nearly the whole day through; but I often observed that his eyes ceased travelling along the lines, and that sometimes, for an hour and more together, he never turned a page.
“My little Gretchen,” he said to me one day, “you are too much in these close rooms with me, and too little in the open air and sunshine.”