Maurice had whispered to her, "I will be with you as soon as possible, Madeleine. Be brave, for my sake!"
The countess had only betrayed her anxious expectancy by changing her usual seat to one where she could watch the door, and by looking up eagerly every time it opened. When, at last, Maurice entered, supporting Count Tristan, there was a gleam of mingled joy and triumph in his mother's eye. It was doubtful whether the triumph of having compelled obedience to her commands, and of having wrested her son from Madeleine, did not surpass the joy she experienced in beholding that son once again.
From her greeting, a stranger would hardly have imagined that when she saw him last his life was in imminent peril, and that she had rushed from his presence overcome by grief and mortification. She now received him as though she had cheated herself into the belief that she was doing the honors in her ancestral château, and that his brief absence had no graver origin than some ordinary pleasure party.
"Welcome, my son, welcome!" said she, kissing him on either cheek. "We have missed you greatly; you are thrice welcome for this brief separation."
Count Tristan returned her salutation, but looked strangely uncomfortable, as though the atmosphere oppressed and chilled him.
"Dear cousin Tristan, I am so glad to see you better; you will soon be quite well again," said Bertha, embracing him far more warmly than his mother had done.
The countess made no allusion to his illness; she preferred wholly to forget the past.
Maurice led his father to an arm-chair, and asked Bertha to bring a pillow. Under Madeleine's tuition Maurice had become quite expert in promoting an invalid's comfort, and yet he now failed to arrange the pillow satisfactorily. Perhaps his father's chair was not easy, or the one to which he was accustomed was more commodious, or Maurice was more clumsy than usual; for though Bertha also lent her aid, the count kept repeating, fretfully,—
"It's not right,—it does not support my shoulders! You can't do it! Leave it alone! Leave it alone!"
They desisted, and sat down beside him.