“Will you”--he began. His voice fell and broke. “Will you go with me?” he ended.
There was a peculiar pause,--a moment, as it seemed to him, of breathless silence. This silence she broke by her rising slowly from her seat.
“Yes,” she responded, “I will go. Why should I not?”
It was midnight when they left the Trents’, and Jenny stood upon the threshold, a bright figure in a setting of brightness, and kissed her hand to them as they went down the steps.
“I hope you will be better to-morrow, Arthur,” she said.
“Yes. You look so tired. I might say haggard, if it was polite.”
“It would not be polite,” said Bertha, “so don’t say it. Good-night, Jenny!”
But when they were seated in the carriage she glanced at her husband’s face.
He passed his hand quickly across his forehead.
“A little fatigued,” he replied. “It is nothing. To-morrow--to-morrow it will be all over.”
As they entered the drawing-room a clock chimed the half hour.
“So late as that!” exclaimed Bertha, and sank into a chair with a faint laugh. “Why, to-day is over,” she said. “It is to-morrow.”
M. Villefort had approached a side table. Upon it lay a peculiar-looking oblong box.
“Ah,” he said, softly, “they have arrived.”
He was bending over the box to open it, and did not turn toward her, as he replied:--
“It is a gift for a young friend of mine,--a brace of pistols. He has before him a long journey in the East, and he is young enough to have a fancy for firearms.”
He was still examining the weapons when Bertha crossed the room on her way up-stairs, and she paused an instant to look at them.
“They are very handsome,” she said. “One could almost wear them as ornaments.”
“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.