The countess, arguing the worst from her silence, cried, with culminating wrath, "Speak, viper! Dart your fangs into the bosom that has sheltered you: it is bared to receive the deadly stroke; it is ready to die of your venom! Nothing remains but for you to strike!"
"Take courage, dearest Madeleine," whispered Bertha. "They will not be angry long. Speak and tell them that you love Maurice as he loves you, and that you will be the happiest of women if you become his wife."
"Well, your answer, Mademoiselle de Gramont?" urged the countess.
"It will be an answer for which I have only the pardon of Maurice to ask," said Madeleine, speaking slowly, but firmly. "Maurice, my cousin, I shall never be able to tell you,—you can never know,—what emotions of thankfulness you have awakened in my soul, nor how unutterably precious your words are to me. Thus much I may say; for the rest, I can never become your wife!"
"You refuse me because my father and my grandmother have compelled you to do so by their reproaches,—their menaces, I might say!" cried Maurice, wholly forgetting his wonted respect in the rush of tumultuous feelings. "This and this only is your reason for consigning me to misery."
The fear that she had awakened unfilial emotions in the bosom of Maurice infused fresh fortitude into Madeleine's spirit.
"No, Maurice, you are wrong. If my aunt and Count Tristan had not uttered one word on the subject, my answer to you would have been the same."
"How can that be possible? How can I have been so deceived? There is only one obstacle which can discourage me, only one which can force me to yield you up, and that is an admission, from your own lips, that your affections are already bestowed,—that your heart is no longer free."
Madeleine, without hesitation, replied in a clear, steady, deliberate tone, looking her cousin full in the face, and not by the faintest sign betraying the poniard which she heroically plunged into her own devoted breast,—