life_."

The half-brothers sat down under a dim hanging lamp in the corridor, and
except that every now and then one or the other stepped noiselessly to
the door to look in upon the sleeping sick man, or in the opposite
direction to moderate by a push with the foot the snoring of Clemence's
"boy," they sat the whole night through in whispered counsel.

The one, at the request of the other, explained how he had come to be
with the little doctor in such extremity.

It seems that Clemence, seeing and understanding the doctor's
imprudence, had sallied out with the resolve to set some person on his
track. We have said that she went in search of her master. Him she met,
and though she could not really count him one of the doctor's friends,
yet, rightly believing in his humanity, she told him the matter. He set
off in what was for him a quick pace in search of the rash invalid, was
misdirected by a too confident child and had given up the hope of
finding him, when a faint sound of distress just at hand drew him into
an alley, where, close down against a wall, with his face to the earth,
lay Doctor Keene. The f.m.c. had just raised him and borne him out of
the alley when Honore came up.

"And you say that, when you would have inquired for him at Frowenfeld's,
you saw Palmyre there, standing and talking with Frowenfeld? Tell me
more exactly."

And the other, with that grave and gentle economy of words which made
his speech so unique, recounted what we amplify:

Palmyre had needed no pleading to induce her to exonerate Joseph. The
doctors were present at Frowenfeld's in more than usual number. There
was unusualness, too, in their manner and their talk. They were not
entirely free from the excitement of the day, and as they talked--with
an air of superiority, of Creole inflammability, and with some
contempt--concerning Camille Brahmin's and Charlie Mandarin's efforts to
precipitate a war, they were yet visibly in a state of expectation.
Frowenfeld, they softly said, had in his odd way been indiscreet among
these inflammables at Maspero's just when he could least afford to be
so, and there was no telling what they might take the notion to do to
him before bedtime. All that over and above the independent, unexplained
scandal of the early morning. So Joseph and his friends this evening,
like Aurora and Clotilde in the morning, were, as we nowadays say of
buyers and sellers, "apart," when suddenly and unannounced, Palmyre
p