nt, at a word. Then Camille half kneeled, half fell, at Josephine's
feet, and, in a voice choked with sobs, bade her dispose of him.

She turned her head away. "Do not speak to me; do not look at me; if we
look at one another, we are lost. Go! die at your post, and I at mine."

He bowed his head, and kissed her dress, then rose calm as despair, and
white as death, and, with his knees knocking under him, tottered away
like a corpse set moving.

He disappeared from the house.

The baroness soon came back, triumphant and gay.

"I have sent her to bid them ring the bells in the village. The poor
shall be feasted; all shall share our joy: my son was dead, and lives.
Oh, joy! joy! joy!"

"Mother!" shrieked Josephine.

"Mad woman that I am, I am too boisterous. Help me, Rose! she is going
to faint; her lips are white."

Dr. Aubertin and Rose brought a chair. They forced Josephine into it.
She was not the least faint; yet her body obeyed their hands just like
a dead body. The baroness melted into tears; tears streamed from Rose's
eyes. Josephine's were dry and stony, and fixed on coming horror. The
baroness looked at her with anxiety. "Thoughtless old woman! It was
too sudden; it is too much for my dear child; too much for me," and she
kneeled, and laid her aged head on her daughter's bosom, saying feebly
through her tears, "too much joy, too much joy!"

Josephine took no notice of her. She sat like one turned to stone
looking far away over her mother's head with rigid eyes fixed on the air
and on coming horrors.

Rose felt her arm seized. It was Aubertin. He too was pale now, though
not before. He spoke in a terrible whisper to Rose, his eye fixed on the
woman of stone that sat there.

"IS THIS JOY?"

Rose, by a mighty effort, raised her eyes and confronted his full. "What
else should it be?" said she.

And with these words this Spartan girl was her sister's champion once
more against all comers, friend or foe.

CHAPTER XVI.

Dr. Aubertin received one day a note from a publishing bookseller, to
inquire whether he still thought of giving the world his valuable work
on insects. The doctor was amazed. "My valuable work! Why, Rose, they
all refused it, and this person in particular recoiled from it as if my
insects could sting on paper."

The above led to a correspondence, in which the convert to insects
explained that the work must be published at the author's expense, the
publisher contenting himself