her moan, and he could remark that, when the sound reached him, Victorine looked grieved, though she spoke not, fearing to rouse the invalid. Suddenly, however, Caliste addressed her, and though her uncle could not hear her words, yet her manner was energetic, and like one still suffering from excitement.
Victorine tried to sooth her, bending over her, and arranging her pillows; during which movement Mimi awoke, and inquired of Caliste “if she felt herself better.”
“Yes, my little Mimi, I am better,” she said, “that is, my head does not pain me as it did; yet, for all that, I am perhaps more miserable than ever. Oh! what shall I do, Victorine, what will become of me? At this moment I would gladly change place with the lowliest and most abject of God’s creatures.”
“Dear Caliste,” replied the astonished child, “how can you say so; you, who are so beautiful, why even Lisette, the Rosiere, was jealous of your beauty more than once this very day.”
“Ah, it is that!” exclaimed Caliste, sitting up in her bed, and clasping her hands together, “it is that very jealousy, Mimi, which I fear will ruin my soul and my body. Oh, Mimi, guard against jealousy, strive against envy as you
would against a desire to murder your own mother.”
The child seemed frightened by her sister’s agitation, and clung closer to Victorine; whilst Caliste continued—“Oh, if you knew the bitter passions raging in my breast this day, if you knew how first I despised, then hated, Lisette; how I should have rejoiced had her beauty been torn from her, and how I should have triumphed in her agony! Oh, wretched, wretched girl that I am, and she too, she spurred me on, she gloried in my misery, she gloried in my downfall; and, for revenge, I would have been glad to have seen her dead at my feet. Do not come near me, Victorine,” she added, “do not pity me, I do not deserve compassion. I hate and loath myself; would I could show to Lisette my repentance, but what will that avail me?—The sin is unwashed from my heart, my conscience drives me to distraction, and there is no peace left for the miserable, undone, Caliste.”
“But nobody need know your thoughts, but Victorine and myself,” urged Mimi; “and we will not tell of you, sister.”
“But God knows them,” she replied in a hollow voice, that made D’Elsac start back from the door. “He knows them and I know