“It is not he who is killing me,” she answered; and then M. Villefort returned to the room with the book he had been in search of.
In this case Edmondstone’s passion took new phases. He wrote no sonnets, painted no pictures. He neglected his work, and spent his idle hours in rambling here and there in a gloomy, unsociable fashion.
“He looks,” said M. Renard, “as if his soul had been playing him some evil trick.”
He had at first complained that Bertha had taken a capricious fancy to Madame de Castro, but in course of time he found his way to the old woman’s salon too, though it must be confessed that Madame herself never showed him any great favor. But this he did not care for. He only cared to sit in the same room with Bertha, and watch her every movement with a miserable tenderness.
One night, after regarding him cynically for some time, Madame broke out to Bertha with small ceremony:—
“What a fool that young man is!” she exclaimed. “He sits and fairly devours you with his eyes. It is bad taste to show such an insane passion for a married woman.”
It seemed as if Bertha lost at once her breath and every drop of blood in her body, for she had neither breath nor color when she turned and looked Madame de Castro in the face.
“Madame,” she said, “if you repeat that to me, you will never see me again—never!”
Upon which Madame snapped her up with some anger at being so rebuked for her frankness.
“Then it is worse than I thought,” she said.