“What do you intend to convey by that term?” Frowenfeld had asked on that earlier occasion.

“Gone over to the enemy means, my son, gone over to the enemy!” replied Agricola.  “It implies affiliation with Americains in matters of business and of government!  It implies the exchange of social amenities with a race of upstarts!  It implies a craven consent to submit the sacredest prejudices of our fathers to the new-fangled measuring-rods of pert, imported theories upon moral and political progress!  It implies a listening to, and reasoning with, the condemners of some of our most time-honored and respectable practices!  Reasoning with?  N-a-hay! but Honore has positively sat down and eaten with them!  What?—­and h-walked out into the stre-heet with them, arm in arm!  It implies in his case an act—­two separate and distinct acts—­so base that—­that—­I simply do not understand them! H-you know, Professor Frowenfeld, what he has done!  You know how ignominiously he has surrendered the key of a moral position which for the honor of the Grandissime-Fusilier name we have felt it necessary to hold against our hereditary enemies!  And—­you—­know—­” here Agricola actually dropped all artificiality and spoke from the depths of his feelings, without figure—­“h-h-he has joined himself in business h-with a man of negro blood!  What can we do?  What can we say?  It is Honore Grandissime.  We can only say, ’Farewell!  He is gone over to the enemy.’”

The new cause of exasperation was the defection of Raoul Innerarity.  Raoul had, somewhat from a distance, contemplated such part as he could understand of Joseph Frowenfeld’s character with ever-broadening admiration.  We know how devoted he became to the interests and fame of “Frowenfeld’s.”  It was in April he had married.  Not to divide his generous heart he took rooms opposite the drug-store, resolved that “Frowenfeld’s” should be not only the latest closed but the earliest opened of all the pharmacies in New Orleans.

This, it is true, was allowable.  Not many weeks afterward his bride fell suddenly and seriously ill.  The overflowing souls of Aurora and Clotilde could not be so near to trouble and not know it, and before Raoul was nearly enough recovered from the shock of this peril to remember that he was a Grandissime, these last two of the De Grapions had hastened across the street to the small, white-walled sick-room and filled it as full of universal human love as the cup of a magnolia is full of perfume.  Madame Innerarity recovered.  A warm affection was all she and her husband could pay such ministration in, and this they paid bountifully; the four became friends.  The little madame found herself drawn most toward Clotilde; to her she opened her heart—­and her wardrobe, and showed her all her beautiful new underclothing.  Raoul found Clotilde to be, for him, rather—­what shall we say?—­starry; starrily inaccessible; but Aurora was emphatically after his liking; he was