"Better now, madame? Are you going to be good?"
Mme. Rambert was reclining on a sofa in her room, watching her attendant, Berthe, moving about and tidying up the slight disorder caused by her recent ministrations. The patient made a little gesture of despair.
"Poor Berthe!" she said. "If you only knew how unhappy I am, and how sorry for having given way to that panic just now!"
"Oh, that was nothing," said the attendant. "The doctor won't attach any importance to that."
"Yes, he will," said the patient with a weary smile. "I think he will attach importance to it, and in any case it will delay my discharge from this place."
"Not a bit of it, madame. Why, you know they have written to your home to say you are cured?"
Mme. Rambert did not reply for a minute or two. Then she said:
"Tell me, Berthe, what do you understand by the word 'cured'?"
"Why, it means that you are better: that you are quite well."
"It is true that my health is better now, and that my stay here has done me good. But that is not what I was talking about. What is your opinion about my madness?"
"You mustn't think about that," the attendant remonstrated. "You are no more mad than I am."
"Oh, I know the worst symptom of madness is to declare you are not mad," Mme. Rambert answered sadly; "so I will be careful not to say it, Berthe. But, apart from this last panic, the reason for which I cannot tell you, have you ever known me do, or heard me say, anything that was utterly devoid of reason, in all the time that I have been in your charge?"
Struck by the remark, the attendant, in spite of herself, was obliged to confess:
"That is," Mme. Rambert finished for her, "I have sometimes protested to you that I was the victim of an abominable persecution, and that there was a tragic mystery in my life: in short, that if I was shut up here, it was because someone wanted me to be shut up. Come now, Berthe, has it never occurred to you that perhaps I was telling the truth?"
The attendant had been shaken for a minute by the calm self-possession of her patient; now she resumed her professional manner.
"Don't worry any more, Mme. Rambert, for you know as well as I do that Dr. Biron acknowledges that you are cured now. You are going to leave the place and resume your ordinary life."