"
Josephine did not immediately reply: her thoughts turned inwards. The
good doctor was proceeding to congratulate her on being cured of a fatal
passion, when she stopped him with wonder in her face. "Not love him!
How can I help loving him? I was his betrothed. I wronged him in my
thoughts. War, prison, anguish, could not kill him; he loved me so. He
struggled bleeding to my feet; and could I let him die, after all? Could
I be crueller than prison, and torture, and despair?"
The doctor sighed deeply; but, arming himself with the necessary
resolution, he sternly replied, "A woman of your name cannot vacillate
between love and honor; such vacillations have but one end. I will not
let you drift a moral wreck between passion and virtue; and that is what
it will come to if you hesitate now."
"Hesitate! Who can say I have hesitated where my honor was concerned?
You can read our bodies then, but not our hearts. What! you see me so
pale, forlorn, and dead, and that does not tell you I have bid Camille
farewell forever? That we might be safer still I have not even told him
he is a father: was ever woman so cruel as I am? I have written him but
one letter, and in that I must deceive him.
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