suffering so much; it broke the ice round my heart, and I love you, I love you! What must I say to make you believe it?"
"Ah! I do not wish to die now!"
He held her clasped in a tight embrace—laughing, crying, beginning sentences with words to end them in kisses. What was all else now to him? Jeanne loved him; his wife was his own again. Out of infinite pity, love had re-risen to give him strength to live anew. And when his wife gently chid him, asking him how it was that during all these terrible months he had never tried to re-awaken that love which was but slumbering, how it was that she had been reduced to the necessity of asking herself whether he had ever loved her, he replied:
"I could not—you ought to have known—I needed you so much."
Now that the ice was broken, he opened his heart to her, and told her all that he had suffered; his horror of the life of darkness which lay before him; how the temptation to put an end to it had grown upon him. He had reasoned it all out, only he wished his death to look like an accident, so that the idea of suicide should not trouble his widow. She might mourn him a little while, and soon be consoled.
"I must find a way."
She, pressing closely against his breast, spoke in her turn, and told him everything, interrupting herself now and then to whisper, "I love you," giving him life again out of her youth and tenderness.
Then they reviewed that morning of anguish; his lost gifts, his frozen and paralysed talents. He asked her to read the chapter he had dictated with so much trouble. Jeanne collected the sheets and read. Karl listened to the end. He seemed to hear once more the death sentence of his hopes. He took the paper out of his wife's hand, and tore it to fragments, in a sort of rage.
"That mine? No! Listen, this is what I wanted to say"—and then, with feverish rapidity, he sketched the chapter which had fallen so flat and heavy before. He sped it forth with all the inspiration of his former days, and all their fire. These had been the secret of his immense success as a popular writer. He interrupted himself passionately.
"That, all that, I have yet in me. It is not dead, but it might as well be so. However, the blind have learned to write ere
