woman had no business with such nerves.  I knew that, and tried to annihilate them; but the more I cut them down, the more they bled.  The thing was a mere trifle,—­the fountain-basin was shallow, the water healthy,—­nothing could be more healthy than bathing,—­and, at any rate, it was no affair of mine.  Yet my mind in some unhealthy mood aggravated the circumstances, and colored everything with its own dark hue.

I could not give up my place, of course not; I was not likely to get so good a situation anywhere else; I could not risk it; and yet the servitude of horror under which I was held for a few weeks was almost enough to reconcile one to starvation.  Only that I was kept busy in the shop most of the time, and had little leisure to observe the course of affairs, or to be in Madame’s society, I should have given warning,—­foolishly enough,—­for there was not a tangible thing of which I had to complain.  But a shapeless suspicion which for some days had been brooding in my mind was taking form, too dim for me to dare to recognize it, but real enough to make me feel a miserable fascination to the house while little Jacques still lived, a magnetic, uncomfortable necessity for my presence, as though it were in some sort a protection against an impending evil.

Such suspicion I did not, of course, presume to name, scarcely presumed to think, it seemed so like an unnatural monstrosity of my own mind.  But when, one morning, the child died, holding in his hands the bonbons his mother had given him, and Madame C——­, all agitation and frenzy and weeping, still contrived to extract them from the tightly closed, tiny fists, and threw them into the grate, I felt a horrid thrill like the effect of the last scene in a tragedy. I knew that the bonbons were poisoned.

So that is the reason I shuddered as I passed through the saloon.

Throwing open the window, a dim light flickered through, and a sickly ray fell upon the fountain.  It shivered upon the dripping marble column in its centre, and struck with an icy hue the water in the basin below.  The fountain was not in my range of vision from the window; but I often turned to look at it as I opened the shutters, thinking it a pretty sight when the drops sparkled in the misty light against the background of the otherwise darkened room.  It pleased my imagination to watch the effect produced by a little more or a little less opening of the shutters,—­a nonsensical morning play-spell, which quite enlivened me for the sedate occupations of the day.  It was, however, not imagination now which whispered to me that there was something else to look at beside the jet of water and the shadowy play of light.  Stooping down upon the fountain-brink, absorbed in contemplating the gold-fish swimming below, and with its naked little feet touching the water’s edge, a tiny figure sat.  My first thought (the first thoughts of fear are never reasonable) was, that some child from