Nearing that garden now, questions and answers suddenly ceased; the child had spoken. Limp and motionless, with his head on Aline's bosom and his eyes closed, "Don't let," he brokenly said, "don't let _him_ go 'way." To him the answer seemed so long coming that he began to repeat; then Aline said---- "No, dear, he shan't leave you." The sisters had telephoned their own physician from the apothecary's shop, and soon, with Cupid on his cot, pushed close to a cool window looking into the rear garden, and the garden lighted by an unseen moon, Mrs. Chester, at the cot's side awaited the doctor's arrival. The restless sisters brought her a tray of rusks and butter and tea, though they would not, could not, taste anything themselves until they should know how gravely the small sufferer--for now he began to suffer--was hurt. "Same time tha'z good to be induztriouz"--this was all said directly above the moaning child--"while tha'z bad, for the sick, to talk ad the bedside, and we can't stay with you and not talk, and we can't go in that front yard; that gate is let open so the doctor he needn' ring and that way excide the patient; and we can't go in the back garden"--they spread their hands and dropped them; the back garden was hopelessly pre-empted. They went to a parlor window and sat looking and longing for the front gate to swing. They had posted on it in Corinne's minute writing: "No admittance excep on business. Open on account sickness. S. V. P. Don't wring the belle!!!" Cupid lay very flat on his back, his face turned to the open window. He had ceased to moan. When Mrs. Chester stole to where, by leaning over, she could see his eyes they were closed. She hoped he slept, but sat down in uncertainty rather than risk waking him. In the moonlit garden Aline and Geoffry paced to and fro. To see them his mother would have to stand and lean over the cot, and neither good mothers nor good nurses do that. She kept her seat, anxiously hoping that the moonlight out there would remain soft enough to veil the worn look which daylight betrayed on her son's face whenever he fell into silence. The talk of the pair was labored. Once they went clear to the bower and turned, without a word. Then Geoffry said: "I know a story I'd like to tell you, though how it would help us in our project--if we now have a project at all--I don't see." "'Tis of the _vieux carre_, that story?" "It's of the _vieux carre_ of the world's heart." "I think I know it." "May I not tell it?" "Yes, you may tell it--although--yes, tell it." "Well, there was once a beautiful girl, as beautiful in soul as in countenance, and worshipped by a few excellent friends, few only because of conditions in her life that almost wholly exiled her from society. Even so, she had suitors--good, gallant men; not of wealth, yet with good prospects and with gifts more essential. But other conditions seemed, to her, to forbid marriage."