away; or had he simply
announced with a look a little more conventional that the end of the end
had come? Were the other two women moving about to perform the offices
that follow in such a case? It made me uneasy not to be nearer, as if I
thought the doctor himself might carry away the papers with him. I bit
my cigar hard as it came over me again that perhaps there were now no
papers to carry!

I wandered about for an hour--for an hour and a half. I looked out for
Miss Tita at one of the windows, having a vague idea that she might come
there to give me some sign. Would she not see the red tip of my cigar
moving about in the dark and feel that I wanted eminently to know what
the doctor had said? I am afraid it is a proof my anxieties had made me
gross that I should have taken in some degree for granted that at such
an hour, in the midst of the greatest change that could take place in
her life, they were uppermost also in Miss Tita's mind. My servant came
down and spoke to me; he knew nothing save that the doctor had gone
after a visit of half an hour. If he had stayed half an hour then Miss
Bordereau was still alive: it could not have taken so much time as that
to enunciate the contrary. I sent the man out of the house; there were
moments when the sense of his curiosity annoyed me, and this was one of
them. HE had been watching my cigar tip from an upper window, if Miss
Tita had not; he could not know what I was after and I could not tell
him, though I was conscious he had fantastic private theories about me
which he thought fine and which I, had I known them, should have thought
offensive.

I went upstairs at last but I ascended no higher than the sala. The
door of Miss Bordereau's apartment was open, showing from the parlor the
dimness of a poor candle. I went toward it with a light tread, and
at the same moment Miss Tita appeared and stood looking at me as I
approached. "She's better--she's better," she said, even before I had
asked. "The doctor has given her something; she woke up, came back to
life while he was there. He says there is no immediate danger."

"No immediate danger? Surely he thinks her condition strange!"

"Yes, because she had been excited. That affects her dreadfully."

"It will do so again then, because she excites herself. She did so this
afternoon."

"Yes; she mustn't come out any more," said Miss Tita, with one of her
lapses into a deeper placidity.

"What is the use of making such a rema