"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."
"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I
watched you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray
listen to me. Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something
rattles in your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough
when you are asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of
phthisis. In those sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the
peculiar symptoms of that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you
are; your hand was moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she
added with a shudder, "and you could still get over it if
unfortunately----But, no," she cried cheerfully, "there is no
'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so the doctors say."
She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one
of those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.
"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."
"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair.
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