"What; the Baron--when he misses it? O I'll settle that." She gave a start as though I had shouted. I thought it a bad sign for the future, and the words that followed seemed to me worse. "Isn't it my duty," she asked--and her eyes betrayed unconsciously the desperateness of her desire--"to explain to him myself?" I answered with a question. "Would that be in the line of retracement, Mrs. Fontenette?" "It would!" she responded, with solemn eagerness. "O it would be! It shall be! I promise you!" "Mrs. Fontenette," said I, "consider. If his wife"--she flinched; she could do so now, for the sudden semi-tropical darkness had fallen--"if his wife-or your husband"--she bit her lip--"knew all--would they think that your duty? Would it take them an instant to refuse their consent? Would they not firmly insist that it is your duty never again to see him alone?" Her only reply was an involuntary moan and a whitening of the face, and for the first time I saw how deep into her soul the poison had gone. "My friend," I continued, "you must not think me meddlesome--officious. I can no more wait for your permission to help you than if you were drowning. Perhaps for good reasons within _me_, I know, better than you, that you-and he--are on a slippery incline, and that whether you can stop your descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you has slipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises or resolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only God knows." ... "Please, sir," said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home fever struck and had died--"yo' lady saunt me fo' to tell you yo' little boy a sett'n on de back steps an' sayin' his head does ache him, an' she wish you'd 'ten' to him, 'caze she cayn't leave his lill' sisteh, 'caze she threaten with convulsion'." XV Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first to the mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressed and in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called her a coward. She saw me pencil on a slip of paper at the mantelpiece, and went and read -"You mustn't stay. He has the fever. You've never had it." She wrote beneath--"I should have got it weeks ago if God paid wages every day. Don't turn me off." I dropped the paper into the small firegrate, added the other from my breastpocket, and set them ablaze, and the new maid, entering, praised burning paper as one of the best deodorizers known.