"I see plainly you are afraid of me," he added, sighing.
Prompted by the instinct of feeble natures the countess interrupted the count by moans, exclaiming:-- "I fear a miscarriage! I clambered over the rocks last evening and tired myself." Hearing those words, the count cast so horribly suspicious a look upon his wife, that she reddened and shuddered.

He mistook the fear of the innocent creature for remorse.
"Perhaps it is the beginning of a regular childbirth," he said.
"What then ?" she said.
"In any case, I must have a proper man here," he said.

"I will fetch one." The gloomy look which accompanied these words overcame the countess, who fell back in the bed with a moan, caused more by a sense of her fate than by the agony of the coming crisis; that moan convinced the count of the justice of the suspicions that were rising in his mind.

Affecting a calmness which the tones of his voice, his gestures, and looks contradicted, he rose hastily, wrapped himself in a dressing-gown which lay on a chair, and began by locking a door near the chimney through which the state bedroom was entered from the reception rooms which communicated with the great staircase.
Seeing her husband pocket that key, the countess had a presentiment of danger.

She next heard him open the door opposite to that which he had just locked and enter a room where the counts of Herouville slept when they did not honor their wives with their noble company.