the stairs with remarkable agility, she ran to the
dining-room, and there beheld Pons, in his shirt, stretched out upon
the tiles. He had fainted. She lifted him as if he had been a feather,
carried him back to his room, laid him in bed, burned feathers under his
nose, bathed his temples with eau-de-cologne, and at last brought him to
consciousness. When she saw his eyes unclose and life return, she stood
over him, hands on hips.

"No slippers! In your shirt! That is the way to kill yourself! Why do
you suspect me?--If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day,
sir. Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you
till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke,
crying like a child on the stairs--and _this_ is my reward! You have
been spying on me. God has punished you! It serves you right! Here I
am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a
mischief that I shall feel all my days. Oh dear, oh dear! and the door
left open too--"

"You were talking with some one. Who was it?"

"Here are notions!" cried La Cibot. "What next! Am I your bond-slave?
Am I to give account of myself to you? Do you know that if you bother me
like this, I shall clear out! You shall take a nurse."

Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the
extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.

"It is my illness!" he pleaded piteously.

"It is as you please," La Cibot answered roughly.

She went. Pons, confused, remorseful, admiring his nurse's scalding
devotion, reproached himself for his behavior. The fall on the paved
floor of the dining-room had shaken and bruised him, and aggravated his
illness, but Pons was scarcely conscious of his physical sufferings.

La Cibot met Schmucke on the staircase.

"Come here, sir," she said. "There is bad news, that there is! M. Pons
is going off his head! Just think of it! he got up with nothing on,
he came after me--and down he came full-length. Ask him why--he knows
nothing about it. He is in a bad way. I did nothing to provoke such
violence, unless, perhaps, I waked up ideas by talking to him of his
early amours. Who knows men? Old libertines that they are. I ought
not to have shown him my arms when his eyes were glittering like
_carbuckles_."

Schmucke listened. Mme. Cibot might have been talking Hebrew for
anything that he understood.

"I have given myself a wrench that I shall feel all my days," adde