Late that night a small square man, in a wet overcoat, fumbled his way into the damp entrance of the house, stumbled up the cracking stairs, unlocked, after many languid efforts, the door of the two rooms, and falling over the hair-trunk, slept until the morning sunbeams climbed over the balcony and in at the window, and shone full on the back of his head.  Old Kookoo, passing the door just then, was surprised to find it slightly ajar—­pushed it open silently, and saw, within, ’Sieur George in the act of rising from his knees beside the mysterious trunk!  He had come back to be once more the tenant of the two rooms.

’Sieur George, for the second time, was a changed man—­changed from bad to worse; from being retired and reticent, he had come, by reason of advancing years, or mayhap that which had left the terrible scar on his face, to be garrulous.  When, once in a while, employment sought him (for he never sought employment), whatever remuneration he received went its way for something that left him dingy and threadbare.  He now made a lively acquaintance with his landlord, as, indeed, with every soul in the neighborhood, and told all his adventures in Mexican prisons and Cuban cities; including full details of the hardships and perils experienced jointly with the “long gentleman” who had married Mademoiselle, and who was no Mexican or Cuban, but a genuine Louisianian.

“It was he that fancied me,” he said, “not I him; but once he had fallen in love with me I hadn’t the force to cast him off.  How Madame ever should have liked him was one of those woman’s freaks that a man mustn’t expect to understand.  He was no more fit for her than rags are fit for a queen; and I could have choked his head off the night he hugged me round the neck and told me what a suicide she had committed.  But other fine women are committing that same folly every day, only they don’t wait until they’re thirty-four or five to do it.—­’Why don’t I like him?’ Well, for one reason, he’s a drunkard!” Here Kookoo, whose imperfect knowledge of English prevented his intelligent reception of the story, would laugh as if the joke came in just at this point.

However, with all Monsieur’s prattle, he never dropped a word about the man he had been before he went away; and the great hair-trunk puzzle was still the same puzzle, growing greater every day.

Thus the two rooms had been the scene of some events quite queer, if not really strange; but the queerest that ever they presented, I guess, was ’Sieur George coming in there one day, crying like a little child, and bearing in his arms an infant—­a girl—­the lovely offspring of the drunkard whom he so detested, and poor, robbed, spirit-broken and now dead Madame.  He took good care of the orphan, for orphan she was very soon.  The long gentleman was pulled out of the Old Basin one morning, and ’Sieur George identified the body at the Treme station.  He never hired a nurse—­the father had sold the lady’s maid quite out of