ard his
head, bowed, and departed.

CHAPTER XIX

ART AND COMMERCE

It was some two or three days after the interview just related that the
apothecary of the rue Royale found it necessary to ask a friend to sit
in the shop a few minutes while he should go on a short errand. He was
kept away somewhat longer than he had intended to stay, for, as they
were coming out of the cathedral, he met Aurora and Clotilde. Both the
ladies greeted him with a cordiality which was almost inebriating,
Aurora even extending her hand. He stood but a moment, responding
blushingly to two or three trivial questions from her; yet even in so
short a time, and although Clotilde gave ear with the sweetest smiles
and loveliest changes of countenance, he experienced a lively renewal of
a conviction that this young lady was most unjustly harboring toward him
a vague disrelish, if not a positive distrust. That she had some mental
reservation was certain.

"'Sieur Frowenfel'," said Aurora, as he raised his hat for good-day,
"you din come home yet."

He did not understand until he had crimsoned and answered he knew not
what--something about having intended every day. He felt lifted he knew
not where, Paradise opened, there was a flood of glory, and then he was
alone; the ladies, leaving adieus sweeter than the perfume they carried
away with them, floated into the south and were gone. Why was it that
the elder, though plainly regarded by the younger with admiration,
dependence, and overflowing affection, seemed sometimes to be, one might
almost say, watched by her? He liked Aurora the better.

On his return to the shop his friend remarked that if he received many
such visitors as the one who had called during his absence, he might be
permitted to be vain. It was Honore Grandissime, and he had left
no message.

"Frowenfeld," said his friend, "it would pay you to employ a regular
assistant."

Joseph was in an abstracted mood.

"I have some thought of doing so."

Unlucky slip! As he pushed open his door next morning, what was his
dismay to find himself confronted by some forty men. Five of them leaped
up from the door-sill, and some thirty-five from the edge of the
_trottoir_, brushed that part of their wearing-apparel which always fits
with great neatness on a Creole, and trooped into the shop. The
apothecary fell behind his defences, that is to say, his prescription
desk, and explained to them in a short and spirited address that he