Madame cooked an omelette with scraps of savoury dried beef in it, and after the first mouthful Ezra was obliged to admit that he relished the food. He could not go on living on his grief, as Madame said. She sat with him and took her breakfast also. Napoleon Pompey, who would have been in the way, was relegated to the society of his mother, who divided her emotions between maternal anger at boyish shortcomings and maternal love for the short-comer, both of which were expressed with the exalted vehemence customary to the negro nature. “I shall come each day and cook your food for you. I have often longed to be able to do something for you, Ezra. Do not forbid my coming. I have had so little joy in my life,” said Madame, with a strange humility of manner totally at variance with her usual character, which was almost domineering, one might say. Ezra looked at her in a troubled sort of way. It soothed him to have her there, and he was glad that somebody, that anybody, could take an interest in him. Still there came across his mind flashes of doubt as to what this interest meant. He could not forget those words that Madame had used on the evening before. No man who had ever heard such words from a woman’s lips, if ever man did hear them under similar circumstances, would ever again be able to drive them from his memory, but in his bruised and suffering state Ezra was content to drift on and let things rest. So Madame came daily to his house and cooked his food and saw that he ate something at each meal. Uncle David and the brethren came to see him, but that gave him no comfort. He shrank from their sympathy, expressed with kindness, but each word was like a drop of molten lead upon a raw wound. Willette was perhaps the only one who gave him real consolation in this awful time. “I say,” remarked the child, in a clear voice and without a trace of embarrassment, “Sister Ollie’s gone an’ lost herself down there in the bush, I reckon. She was ’bout the greenest hand at keepin’ to the Pole Star ever I see. You could throw her out o’ her direction quicker nor nothin’. I guess she headed plumb for the Missouri border when she come ’long with Cotterell to show him out o’ Union Mills. Guess she’ll ride ’bout down to Saint Jo ’fore she knows she’s headin’ wrong. I wouldn’t ’spect her back ’fore a fortnight.” Willette laughed pleasantly, and poor Ezra derived some comfort from the preposterous convictions of the child and her unshakable belief in Olive. He went to Union Mills to make some inquiries about his lost wife, and met there the same story that Madame had already told, but the story was so brutally hurled at him he could not bear it, and came home bruised and stricken, his heart bleeding tears of agony. Instinctively he went to Madame for comfort.