Everything seemed changed to the returned wanderer.  Poor man!  The changes were very slight save in their altered relation to him.  To one broken in health, and still more to one with a broken heart, old scenes fall upon the sight in broken rays.  A sort of vague alienation seemed to the little doctor to come like a film over the long-familiar vistas of the town where he had once walked in the vigor and complacency of strength and distinction.  This was not the same New Orleans.  The people he met on the street were more or less familiar to his memory, but many that should have recognized him failed to do so, and others were made to notice him rather by his cough than by his face.  Some did not know he had been away.  It made him cross.

He had walked slowly down beyond the old Frowenfeld corner and had just crossed the street to avoid the dust of a building which was being torn down to make place for a new one, when he saw coming toward him, unconscious of his proximity, Joseph Frowenfeld.

“Doctor Keene!” said Frowenfeld, with almost the enthusiasm of Raoul.

The doctor was very much quieter.

“Hello, Joe.”

They went back to the new drug-store, sat down in a pleasant little rear corner enclosed by a railing and curtains, and talked.

“And did the trip prove of no advantage to you?”

“You see.  But never mind me; tell me about Honore; how does that row with his family progress?”

“It still continues; the most of his people hold ideas of justice and prerogative that run parallel with family and party lines, lines of caste, of custom and the like they have imparted their bad feeling against him to the community at large; very easy to do just now, for the election for President of the States comes on in the fall, and though we in Louisiana have little or nothing to do with it, the people are feverish.”

“The country’s chill-day,” said Doctor Keene; “dumb chill, hot fever.”

“The excitement is intense,” said Frowenfeld.  “It seems we are not to be granted suffrage yet; but the Creoles have a way of casting votes in their mind.  For example, they have voted Honore Grandissime a traitor; they have voted me an encumbrance; I hear one of them casting that vote now.”

Some one near the front of the store was talking excitedly with Raoul: 

“An’—­an’—­an’ w’at are the consequence?  The consequence are that we smash his shop for him an’ ’e ’ave to make a noo-start with a Creole partner’s money an’ put ‘is sto’ in charge of Creole’!  If I know he is yo’ frien’?  Yesseh!  Valuable citizen?  An’ w’at we care for valuable citizen?  Let him be valuable if he want; it keep’ him from gettin’ the neck broke; but—­he mus’-tek-kyeh—­’ow—­he—­talk’!  He-mus’-tek-kyeh ’ow he stir the ’ot blood of Louisyanna!”

“He is perfectly right,” said the little doctor, in his husky undertone; “neither you nor Honore is a bit sound, and I shouldn’t wonder if they would hang you both, yet; and as for that darkey who has had the impudence to try to make a commercial white gentleman of himself—­it may not be I that ought to say it, but—­he will get his deserts—­sure!”