“I will call—­I will call,” said I, gasping,—­“I will call Monsieur C——­; he”——­

“Don’t, don’t, I beg of you!” she cried, catching me by the sleeve, with a sardonic laugh; low, whispering, full of direful meaning, it stealthily echoed through the saloon.  “Don’t disturb the good man.  He sleeps so soundly after his well-spent days! He doesn’t have any bad dreams, I fancy,—­rid of such a troublesome, vicious wife,—­a wife who harassed her husband to death, and murdered her little boy,—­he sleeps sound, doesn’t he?  And yet—­I declare, in the name of God, Christine C——­,”—­and she lifted up her bony finger like an avenging fate,—­“he did it!”

I had been endeavoring to calm myself while this woman of spectral face and form stared at me with her maniac eye across the counter.  I had succeeded.  At any rate, this was a tangible horror, and could be grappled with; it was not beyond human reach, a shadowy retribution from the invisible world.  To face the circumstances, however repulsive, is less depressing than to await in suspense the coming of their footsteps, and the descent of that blow we know they will inflict.  I had always found that policy best which was bravest.  I remembered this now.  Dropping my high tone, and soothing my excited features, I beckoned the woman and gave her a chair; I took a chair myself, wrapping a shawl close about me to repress the shivering I could not yet overcome, and I and that woman, returned from the grave, as it seemed to me, sat calmly down in business-fashion, and held a long conversation.

Madame C——­ had loved her husband with that sort of respectful, awe-filled affection which lower natures experience towards those which are a grade above them.  She had loved her children, too, although they were her torment.  Her inability to manage or keep them in order fretted and irritated her excessively.  Monsieur, as a philosopher, could not understand the anomaly, that a woman who was perpetually unhappy and ill-tempered, while her children, young, buoyant, and mischievous, were about her, should sympathize with and care for them when sick.  He could not understand her conscience-stricken misery when little Jacques drooped after her severity towards him.  Monsieur was a kind husband, however, and a wise man in many things.  He had studied much in his youth, chiefly medical works, of which he had quite a collection.  He could not understand the whimsical nervousness of women, but, when so slight a thing as a child’s illness appeared to be the cause of it, could unhesitatingly undertake to remove the difficulty.  He had prescribed attentively for the two children who died before Jacques, thereby rendering them comfortable and quiet, and saving quite an item in the doctor’s bill.