“But they would have too threatening a look,” he answered, lightly.
As he raised his eyes they met hers. She half started backward, moved by a new sense of the haggardness of his face.
“You are ill!” she exclaimed. “You are as colorless as marble.”
“And you, too,” he returned, still with the same tender lightness. “Let us hope that our ‘to-morrow’ will find us both better, and you say it is tomorrow now. Good-night!”
She went away without saying more. Weary as she was, she knew there was no sleep for her, and after dismissing her maid, she threw herself upon the lounge before the bedroom fire and lay there. To-night she felt as if her life had reached its climax. She burst into a passion of tears.
“Jenny! Jenny!” she cried, “how I envy—how I envy you!”
The recollection of Jenny shining in her pretty gala dress, and delighting in her birthday presents, and everybody else’s pride and affection, filled her with a morbid misery and terror. She covered her face with her hands as she thought of it.
“Once,” she panted, “as I looked at her tonight, for a moment I almost hated her. Am I so bad as that?—am I?”
Scarcely two seconds afterward she had sprung to her feet and was standing by the side of her couch, her heart beating with a rapid throb of fright, her limbs trembling. A strange sound had fallen suddenly upon the perfect silence of the night—a sound loud, hard, and sharp—the report of a pistol! What dread seized her she knew not. She was across the room and had wrenched the door open in an instant, then with flying feet down the corridor and the staircase. But half-way down the stairs she began to cry out aloud, “Arthur! Arthur!” not conscious of her own voice—“Arthur, what is it?” The door of the drawing-room flew open before the fierce stroke of her palm.
M. Villefort stood where she had left him; but while his left hand supported his weight against the table, his right was thrust into his breast. One of the pistols lay at his feet.