"My friend," I continued, "you must not think me meddlesome--officious. I
can no more wait for your permission to help you than if you were
drowning. Perhaps for good reasons within _me_, I know, better than you,
that you-and he--are on a slippery incline, and that whether you can stop
your descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you has
slipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises or
resolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only God knows." ...
"Please, sir," said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home fever
struck and had died--"yo' lady saunt me fo' to tell you yo' little boy a
sett'n on de back steps an' sayin' his head does ache him, an' she wish
you'd 'ten' to him, 'caze she cayn't leave his lill' sisteh, 'caze she
threaten with convulsion'."
XV
Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first to
the mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressed
and in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called her
a coward.
She saw me pencil on a slip of paper at the mantelpiece, and went and read
-"You mustn't stay. He has the fever. You've never had it."
She wrote beneath--"I should have got it weeks ago if God paid wages every
day.
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