Sister Benie and a Dissertation on Charity

The thought of him stirred her as nothing had ever before stirred her.
It was hate, it was wounded pride crying out for vengeance, it was the
barb of scorn urging her to give back in kind. And, heaven above! he
had been on his knees, and she had dallied with the moment of revenge
even as a cat dallies with a mouse. Diane! She detested the name.
Fool! And yet, why was he here? What was this sudden veil of mystery
which hid him from her secret eyes? Victor knew, and yet his love for
her was not so great that he could tell her another's secret. And the
governor knew, D'Hérouville, and the vicomte; and they were as silent
as stone. Love? A fillip of her finger for love! Happy indeed was
she to learn that neither the marquis nor the Chevalier would return to
France on the Henri IV. Such a way have the women.

Monsieur le Marquis lay in his bed, the bed from which he was to rise
but once again in life. His thin fingers had drawn the coverlet
closely under his chin, and from time to time they worked
spasmodically. His head, scarce less white than the pillow beneath it,
went on nodding from side to side, as if in perpetual negation to those
puzzling questions which occupied his brain. His eyebrows were
constantly bending, and his grey eyes burned with a fever which was
never to be subdued. Across the foot of the bed lay a golden bar of
morning sunlight.