Though he dozed only at wide intervals and briefly, he asked no more
questions until night; then--"Who's with my wife?"
"Mine."
He closed his eyes again, peacefully. It was in keeping with his perfect
courtesy not to ask how the new patient was. If she was doing well,--well;
and if not, he would spare us the pain of informing or deceiving him.
Senda became a kind of chief-of-staff for both sides of the street. She
would have begged to be Mrs. Fontenette's nurse, but for one other
responsibility, which we felt it would be unsafe, and she thought it would
be unfair, for her to put thus beyond her own reach: "se care of mine
hussbandt."
She wore a plain path across the unpaved street to our house, and another
to our neighbor's. "Sat iss a too great risk," she compassionately
maintained, "to leaf even in se daytime sose shiltren--so late sick--alone
viss only mine hussbandt and se sairvants!"
The doctor was concerned for Mrs. Fontenette from the beginning. "Terribly
nervous," he said, "and full from her feet to her eyes, of a terror of
death--merely a part of the disease, you know." But in this case I did not
know.
"Pathetic," he called the fevered satisfaction she took in the hovering
attentions of our old black nurse, who gave us brief respites in the two
sick-rooms by turns, and who had according to Mrs.
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