“Tell me, did you close the street door?”
She answered with an affirmative motion of the head, and as she came toward him, extending her two hands in her great need of sympathy and support, he added:
“You know it was I who killed him.”
She did not understand; she did not believe him. He felt no flutter in the two little hands that rested confidingly in his own.
“It was I who killed him—yes, ’twas over yonder, behind a barricade, I did it. He was fighting on one side, I on the other—”
There began to be a fluttering of the little hands.
“We were like drunken men, none of us knew what he as about—it was I who killed him.”
Then Henriette, shivering, pale as death, withdrew her hands, fixing on him a gaze that was full of horror. Father of Mercy, was the end of all things come! was her crushed and bleeding heart to know no peace for ever more! Ah, that Jean, of whom she had been thinking that very day, happy in the unshaped hope that perhaps she might see him once again! And it was he who had done that abominable thing; and yet he had saved Maurice, for was it not he who had brought him home through so many perils? She could not yield her hands to him now without a revolt of all her being, but she uttered a cry into which she threw the last hope of her tortured and distracted heart.
“Oh! I will save him; I must save him, now!”
She had acquired considerable experience in surgery during the long time she had been in attendance on the hospital at Remilly, and now she proceeded without delay to examine her brother’s hurt, who remained unconscious while she was undressing him. But when she undid the rude bandage of Jean’s invention, he stirred feebly and uttered a faint cry of pain, opening wide his eyes that were bright with fever. He recognized her at once and smiled.