“Yes. Save Jacques, and, by all that is sacred to me in the world, I promise I will enter a convent: I will disappear, and you shall never hear my name any more.”
Intense astonishment seized the countess, and she looked at Dionysia with a glance full of doubt and mistrust. Such devotion seemed to her too sublime not to conceal some snare.
“You would really do that?” she asked.
“Unhesitatingly.”
“You would make a great sacrifice for my benefit?”
“For yours? No, madam, for Jacques’s.”
“You love him very dearly, do you?”
“I love him dearly enough to prefer his happiness to my own a thousand times over. Even if I were buried in the depths of a convent, I should still have the consolation of knowing that he owed his rehabilitation to me; and I should suffer less in knowing that he belonged to another than that he was innocent, and yet condemned.”
But, in proportion as the young girl thus confirmed her sincerity, the brow of the countess grew darker and sterner, and passing blushes mantled her cheek. At last she said with haughty irony,—
“Admirable!”