I promised to use all gentleness and courtesy toward Miss Fillmore, but the full significance of my debt to the young lady did not appear to me till later. Eventually I found that by some inexplicable freak of logic I was supposed to be chiefly in fault for the Chinese girl’s wound. I had bungled the enterprise, it seemed; otherwise she must have been brought safely off. The sense of my delinquency was finally stirred within me by overhearing the comment of two indignant servants, which ran something like this: "Those two big men without ever a scratch on them, and that poor heathen creature bleeding to death between ’em--that’s what I call a shame." Below stairs, it thus appeared that I shared equally with Mr. Baldwin in the discredit of the outcome. In my lady’s chamber it was different. I learned that in those sacred realms I had all the blame for my very own. Mr. Baldwin appeared to be regarded, like the gallant army of Bazaine or Mack, as merely the unfortunate victim of an incompetent leader. Nothing of this judgment came to me directly. But it was conveyed delicately, imperceptibly, intangibly, through the days when the girl’s life hung in suspense, mingled with an unspoken assurance that as I didn’t appear to know any better I should ultimately be forgiven. All this was galling enough, but it was nothing compared to the afflictions I suffered from the sight of Mr. Baldwin’s airs. He was possessed of a cold and haughty nature, but the situation roused in him something approaching an enthusiasm. For my sorrow he was endowed with an odious gift of competency, and no false modesty restrained him from exhibiting it to the fullest measure. Whenever I offered to perform a service, I found that he had already performed it, or was then engaged upon it, or was just about to perform it, until I was consumed with regret that the highbinder bullet had not found its billet with Mr. Baldwin, instead of with the Chinese girl.