"From Rome! And Pierre Olsdorf is coming to me, Madame Meyrin! Oh, God!"
"Lise, be calm, I beseech you," said her mother. "These emotions kill you."
The unhappy woman seemed to hear nothing; her eyes wandered, her discolored lips spoke disconnected words. Struggling with some terrible hallucination, she tried with her thin, transparent, bloodless hands to push away the phantoms crowding about her.
This crisis lasted nearly a quarter of an hour, while the general's wife and Marthe thought that Lise was dying. However, the poor martyr presently became calmer, and a little blood returned to her face.
In a few moments, when she had quite regained her senses, and had once more recognized her mother and Marthe, she reassured them with a gesture; then, suddenly, her smiling eyes were turned to the door of the room which had just been softly opened. The ex-Countess Barineff and Mme. Daubrel turned around.
It was Dumesnil who came in.
Recognizing her old lover, though she had not seen him for twenty years, the general's wife could not master her movement of surprise. She knew nothing of the friendly relations between her daughter and the old comedian.
The good man did not seem to recognize Mme. Froment. Thinking only of his cherished patient, whose eyes called him to her side, he drew near, bent to kiss her tenderly, and then only he coldly saluted Mme. Podoi, to whom Lise said, in a faint voice:
"This is another friend, mother, whom you must love too as you will love Marthe. His devotion to me has been boundless. If I had been his daughter he could not have tended me more carefully. She and he have been all my family these six months. But I remember; you are not strangers. Yes, Dumesnil told me formerly, when I was happy, that he knew me as quite a baby. It seems I was pretty then; and he was infatuated with me. How far away all that is now. I was beautiful as I grew older—too beautiful. And now?"
This was too much for their two hearts. Their grief, so long repressed, was about to burst forth in sobs, when the doctor was announced who paid Mme. Meyrin a daily visit, though he had given up all hope of her recovery.