you. Be easy, you have a
good friend beside you, and without boasting, a woman as will nurse you
like a mother nurses her first child. I nursed Cibot round once when
Dr. Poulain had given him over; he had the shroud up to his eyes, as the
saying is, and they gave him up for dead. Well, well, you have not come
to that yet, God be thanked, ill though you may be. Count on me; I would
pull you through all by myself, I would! Keep still, don't you fidget
like that."

She pulled the coverlet over the patient's hands as she spoke.

"There, sonny! M. Schmucke and I will sit up with you of nights. A
prince won't be no better nursed... and besides, you needn't refuse
yourself nothing that's necessary, you can afford it.--I have just been
talking things over with Cibot, for what would he do without me, poor
dear?--Well, and I talked him round; we are both so fond of you, that he
will let me stop up with you of a night. And that is a good deal to ask
of a man like him, for he is as fond of me as ever he was the day we
were married. I don't know how it is. It is the lodge, you see; we are
always there together! Don't you throw off the things like that!" she
cried, making a dash for the bedhead to draw the coverlet over Pons'
chest. "If you are not good, and don't do just as Dr. Poulain says--and
Dr. Poulain is the image of Providence on earth--I will have no more to
do with you. You must do as I tell you--"

"Yes, Montame Zipod, he vill do vat you dell him," put in Schmucke; "he
vants to lif for his boor friend Schmucke's sake, I'll pe pound."

"And of all things, don't fidget yourself," continued La Cibot, "for
your illness makes you quite bad enough without your making it worse for
want of patience. God sends us our troubles, my dear good gentlemen; He
punishes us for our sins. Haven't you nothing to reproach yourself with?
some poor little bit of a fault or other?"

The invalid shook his head.

"Oh! go on! You were young once, you had your fling, there is some
love-child of yours somewhere--cold, and starving, and homeless.... What
monsters men are! Their love doesn't last only for a day, and then in
a jiffy they forget, they don't so much as think of the child at the
breast for months.... Poor women!"

"But no one has ever loved me except Schmucke and my mother," poor Pons
broke in sadly.

"Oh! come, you aren't no saint! You were young in your time, and a
fine-looking young fellow you must have been at twenty. I should