“And if I go away,” asked he, “what will become of you?”
A sob burst from the young girl’s breast, and her strength seemed to desert her limbs.
“I,” answered she, in the calm, resigned voice of a Christian virgin about to be cast to the lions that roared in the arena, “I have my destiny. To-day is the last time that we shall ever meet. I shall return to my home, where everything will shortly be known. I shall find my father angry and menacing. He will place me in a carriage, and the next day I shall find myself within the walls of the hated convent.”
“But that life would be one long, slow agony to you. You have told me this before.”
“Yes,” answered she, “it would be an agony, but it would also be an expiation; and when the burden grows too heavy, I have this.”
And as she spoke, she drew the little bottle from its hiding-place in her bosom, and Norbert too well understood her meaning. The young man endeavored to take it from her, but she resisted. This contest seemed to exhaust her little strength, her beautiful eyes closed, and she sank senseless into Norbert’s arms. In an agony of despair, the young man asked himself if she was dying; and yet there was sufficient life in her to enable her to whisper, soft and low, these words, “My only friend—let me have it back, dear Norbert.” And then, with perfect clearness, she repeated all the deadly properties of the drug, and the directions for its use that the Counsellor had given to her.
On hearing the woman whom he loved with such intense passion confess that she would sooner die than live apart from him, Norbert’s brain reeled.
“Diana, my own Diana!” repeated he, as he hung over her.
But she went on, as though speaking through the promptings of delirium.
“The very day after such a fair prospect! Ah, Duke de Champdoce! You are a hard and pitiless man. You have robbed me of all I held dear in the world, blackened my reputation, and tarnished my honor, and now you want my life.”